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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

TIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?

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A competing product would have to at least be on par in terms of quality, licensing, UI/UX, app availability, sync, web interface. They'd have to start sacrificing living animals before I'd consider switching.

They're even still honoring lifelong premium access for first purchases of their apps.

We have such different experiences. Pocket Casts works, but I find nothing about it amazing. Too much Apple-like simplification in managing my queue.

I found Podcast Addict to be significantly superior.

I've checked it out here and there. UI is way too convoluted for my taste and the legacy Android UI elements shine through way too often. Looks like Material Design on a pig. If it works for you, all good though.

While not necessary, especially because of the proprietary sync stuff you can't self host, Pocket Cast is open source.

Without knowing why you consider overcast a disaster, no

What features are you looking for? What features are you avoiding?

Overcast had an update earlier this year which made it completely unusable (for my use case, at least). The developer's reaction to feedback from and apparent contempt of users was so poor that I wouldn't use a product they created again.

Not sure what you're looking for wrt features, but I've been happy with Podcast Addict for years

Just keep using Pocket Casts rather than being buffeted on the winds of the news cycle.

This particular matter also affects me professionally (although not directly, but by precedent), so as a matter of principle, I'll find another solution.

What is bad about overcast?

Could be the redesign that was launched a couple of months ago that still some folks seem to dislike.

there are a few choices that were made that are very odd. Like the old interface where you could swipe on the 'poster' to get the episode info was nice, they switched it to a button, but it looks like the recently undid that one and it's back to swipe.

Hard to say now but I was coming from AntennaPod on Android, and when I switched to iPhone I needed a new podcast app, and Overcast was different in annoying ways and with Pocket Casts I was able to change some settings to get it to be more like AntennaPod. I think part of it was having a download button on each episode in the list.

Yeah TIL and now I’m done with that

Overcast is at least independent, so I’ll go back to them for now.

It's obvious that you're somehow personally involved in this situation, since you have filled this thread with multiple comments which range from dismissive to plain rude. And the whole thread reeks of comments who just try to frame company's CEO as irrational, which contribute next to nothing to understanding the two companies' dispute, while raising some disbelief for their motive in the first place.

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