I recently tried Apple Music and then gave up because it didn’t support podcasts and the podcast apps that exist in the Apple ecosystem aren’t as good as Spotify
Do you mean Spotify is better because it's all in one? Or specifically as a podcast client it's better? Because, as a podcast client, Spotify is shockingly bad. Perhaps the worst podcast client available. Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocketcasts are all much, much better.
This is Spotify's main advantage: most people already have it installed, and it's good enough if you don't care that much about the podcast-listening experience.
Anyways, I can't seem to find a suitable alternative that will keep track of my listening progress across both linux and iOS.
What is so special about podcast-listening experience that you would need a specific player for?
The UI is lackluster, since it's just the same one from the normal Spotify Music experience. Because they bought Joe Rogan they had to add video too and video is horribly implemented. There isn't even an obvious way to turn it off. I consider myself tech-savy but I gave up trying to turn off and just switched to Apple Podcasts.
Podcasts and Music are not the same.
Please if you really want Podcasts to happen then, Spotify, make a separate App for it.
Not a spotify nor Apple Music/Podcast/itunes user here.
Aren't both audio stuff where you press play, pause, stop, rewind and fast forward?
The only difference I can think of is that you might sometimes want to accelerate playback of podcasts but that doesn't mean it can't exist in the same player.
1) An online catalog of series that is searchable (probably both by name and topic and participants).
2) That catalog must contain metadata both at a series level and an episode level.
3) That online catalog must also be navigable without search, of course.
4) Ability to subscribe to any given series and for the app to have an option to pre-cache an episode for offline use.
5) Several content controls that aren't really required for music listening but are must haves for podcasts such as timed skips (30s, 60s) and playback speed adjustment (only useful in a music player where you probably want to do beat matching).
I think the biggest differentiator though is the episode/series catalog. It makes podcasts actually discoverable.
I don't think it is hard in term of UI nor does it justify a different app when you can have an additionnal tab that allows to find podcast. You just have to change the criterias.
Subscription to podcast is done via rss right? I don't think that is a huge deal either.
It just comes down to that management/browse/search task dwarfs the playback code.
I'd rather have small apps that do one thing well, not a megaapp that does all things badly.
* discover/search podcasts and subscribe to them.
* download new episodes automatically
* create a playlist of episodes; when an episode is finished, it's removed from the list and deleted automatically
* keep track of your position in an episode; since they can several hours long, you don't want to restart from the beginning
I like listening to mine on Overcast (previously with the Apple Podcasts app)