overcast is a pretty good alternative to apple podcasts if you are looking for something else
Try Pocket Casts too, much better for makingsure your regular Podcasts are downloaded before things go offline.
I tried switching to Apple Podcasts and I found out the hard way that it didnt download my episodes before a 10 hour flight.
Apple Music is bad with this too. Even though it's what I use for streaming, I simply do not trust it to keep things locally if it decides it might have a better idea about whether I need disk space than it does. I use Castro for podcasts (inbox/queue works great for maintaining local downloads) and Doppler for music.
Although Overcast has some infuriating UI/UX nonsense (like not remembering where you are if you swap away from the app, searches not being sorted, etc.) and some weird bugs (sometimes when you play, it'll do a couple of seconds and then stop. Might be related to a previously downloaded episode being evicted from cache but handle that properly!)
On the other hand, it's the least worst podcast app I've tried on iOS thus far.
yeah i have no idea why you can't sort the list of podcasts manually but at least i figured out you can pin the ones to the top in the (iirc) reverse order you pin them. least worst podcast app is probably the best way to put it. pretty good but definitely could be really good with some ux designer love.
Seconded. Phenomenal app made by a single dev.
I wanted something for my computer. But yeah Overcast is solid for the phone