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Comment by l33tbro | Hacker News Reader

Overcast really destroys everything else I've used for listening to a podcast. Simple and intuitive UI, customizable streaming/download settings, quickly add any podcast - and that's at the free level. I would never go back to Apple or even Spotify.

I rarely get enthusiastic about apps, but it's awesome when one clearly demonstrates a team having gone 'how can we get this right'?

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Just so you know, Overcast is not a team. It's one guy.

marco.org

The sheer productivity and boundless creativity of this guy is exceptional. Thanks for the mention.

One of the heroes who allowed my teenage musings to be published on Tumblr. It's so wild and fascinating to know that the same single is behind one of the top podcast player app. Source: https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product

The Overcast feature set is great and it's my podcast app but the UX & UI is just atrocious.

Tried all the common choices for iOS like Overcast and Castro, but settled on Pocket Casts. It’s cross platform and open source (client only) and in my opinion has the best UX. Also the only one with a reliable offline Apple Watch experience back when I tested them.

I bought PocketCasts early on and my account got grandfathered into a lifetime subscription. Also have no plans of switching.

i really just wish overcast had:

- listen history (with stats, so i can know what i spent the most time on and tell them/reward them accordingly)

- good history search (that doesnt keep searching podcasts im not subscribed to)

- good to-listen search (that doesnt keep searching podcasts im not subscribed to)

- would be nice: on device transcription

Can’t speak to the rest of it, but Marco has said that he’s working on something on the “listen history” front after tons of request from people asking for something à la Spotify Wrapped.

The trick is that he’s very adamantly (and correctly imo) opposed to user tracking of almost any kind, which I think complicates things here

sure but thats not at odds with using data you already have, storing it locally, to strictly improve user experience

Oh for sure, I’m not saying it’s not feasible but I think it’s not unreasonable that people would want this feature to work/sync across multiple devices, and that’s where the much higher complexity comes in since syncing that data reliably using CloudKit seems to be frustrating atm (none of this is my domain at all, just pure speculation based on what I’ve read and recall him saying on podcasts so I could be way off)

+1 for Overcast. Easily my most used app, even more than Music.

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