How did you choose your podcast app and would you switch to a different one?
I first started getting into Podcasts in 2017 after hearing about them for years. I finally had a regular, medium length commute to an internship and was tired of the radio and listening to music in the morning. I did a quick search for "Best Android Podcast app" and saw that Pocket Casts was highly reviewed. Since I had enough credit in my account to purchase it, I went ahead and installed it and never ended up looking for another app. Since then, I've become hooked as my form of audio entertainment/information gathering over the years, and Pocket Casts has become an app that I use every day.
I was thinking this morning while opening my app, what would cause me to switch. I briefly considered switching when Pocket Casts moved to a subscription model, but the features that were included in that subscription are really only "nice to haves" for me and how I use the app. This got me thinking about how other people engage with podcasts and choose the app that they use.
- How did you choose your podcast app?
- Do you ever try out other podcast apps?
- Are there any features that would/did make you want to switch to a different app?
- Do you use a cross-platform podcast app or different apps on different platforms?
- What are your favorite/most used features of your current podcast app?
- What podcast(s) are you currently listening to that you'd like to recommend to others?
I've gone through several, and have settled on AntennnaPod. It's the one that's recommended by privacy guides (aka no trackers). It's lightweight and does what I want it to do.
The big thing for me is that I can subscribe to rss feeds, which means I run my YouTube subs from there as well. I have the app open the videos via NewPipe as a download, and then I have a local folder as a sub as well. So basically my videos joins my podcasts in the queue, which I can watch offline whenever.
Also a fan of AntennaPod.
Wrote up the entire post, posted and refreshed to see you beat me to it! Also the youtube feed into Antennapod then viewed in Newpipe is so smart and surprised I never knew that was an option. Definitely gonna look into getting that set up.
Edit: Clarity
Your post is far better than mine is! I just did it faster because I had less to say 🤣
Yup, I wanted to go out of my way to avoid the YouTube environment full stop (suggestions, likes, comments, etc), and then remembered that YouTube still has RSS. The one caveat with my very jury-rigged method is that to get it to be seamless, the automatic action is set up to be "download", which means that if you link me a YouTube video, I have to download. I think I can have it set up for it to ask me every time, but eh, I can't be bothered.
But you set up a Videos folder wherever, add the folder to AntennaPod, and save your videos there. Then when you refresh, they're in your inbox. So the process is, YouTube video shows up in your inbox, you open and download it and mark it as completed. Then you refresh again, and the downloaded video shows up. Then I just add it to my queue.
Another vote for AntennaPod. The auto-sleep feature that I turn on between 9 PM and 7AM really helps keep me from losing my place entirely when I fall asleep again. Auto-rewind set to a few minutes helps me get back in easily.
Really the only podcast I listen to is Kingslingers. It's a Stephen King book club. Takes me forever because you read two long chapters before you listen. I do reccomend starting with The Dark Tower at the very beginning, especially if you haven't read it. Mike hadn't read any King, and Scott is an obsessive. They do a deep read of the whole series, and then continue on through his other works.They sometimes call back to other references, but many are re-reads so I'll skip around.
Interesting. I fell into YouTube Music for a minute because it could have my podcasts and YouTube "podcasts" in the same queue. But that system sounds way more thorough.
I didn't even know you could do that with YouTube Music! Yeah, I kinda slowly ended up with my system because I was intentionally trying to get away from YouTube as social media (likes, comments, etc). I just wanted the videos.
I have used Antennapod on Android for as long as I've had a specific podcast app. I only really got into listening to a podcasts a lot in the past few years, and started out using Spotify. For a number of reasons, I wanted to separate my podcast source from my music source, chief among them being having an untainted Spotify wrapped, at the time I believe songs and podcast stats were mixed together, and if i ever wanted to stop paying for Spotify to not have to deal with ads on top of the normal ads in a lot of podcasts. I found Antennapod through some googling of decent Android podcast apps, and on a reddit post someone recommended it as a no frills podcast app. The app is open source and lets you subscribe to any RSS feed. If there is a pay walled function, I haven't found it nor ran into any walls.
Everything just works to my needs, which are: download podcasts, listen to podcasts. It seems to have a large amount of customization, though I rarely see a need to delve too deep. It has never crashed or bugged out on me in anyway. It remembers where you pause in any episode, supports chapters, has a queue function which i use rarely but appreciate when needed.
Because of an overall satisfaction, I haven't really had much of a desire to switch or try out other apps. The only thing I partially miss is that Antennapod doesn't really track your listening to the same extent. You can see some basic stats, but nothing crazy. This isnt wholly a negative, I appreciate having something not collecting data on everything I do all the time, but stats breakdowns are kind of neat. It notably isn't cross platform (Android only, Playstore and F-droid) and has no web player, but times I'm listening to podcasts not on my phone at work or in the car are exceedingly rare. None of these are enough to make me considered switching, especially when most are increasingly profit driven if the talks of subscription in this thread is anything to go by. If you have an Android and the above drawbacks aren't deal breakers, I recommend checking it out.
My podcast shoutouts are mostly video game related, but pretty much anything on The Worst Garbage podcast network has my recommendation. They are all very low key, most have limited advertising in episode, which is a real plus for me. Into The Aether is a notable highlight, as well as Videogame Podtimism and Press Start. The former two are both very low key gaming podcasts hosted by two longtime friends that have very different voices, while the latter is a gaming news show hosted by three gen z actual working journalists. All three of these shows tend to have well expressed nuanced takes on life and media tied into the introspective analysis they do of the things they engage with. There are loads of other good shows on the network, some not gaming related at all, and they're all earnest and come from a love of the things they cover, which makes them easy listening and mainly good vibes. That continues to be a real boon in trying times.
When I switched from iphone to android back around 2012 "Podcast Addict" was one of the top results in the google play store. It's always done everything I wanted it to, and I've been using it ever since. It plays podcasts. It keeps track of my subscriptions and tells me when there's new episodes.
I'm not sure what else I would even want it to do, or what features would make me switch.
I ran Pocket Casts (PC) for a very long time, probably 2015-ish to earlier this year, when I switched to Podcast Addict (PA). My biggest complaint about the PC model is that they cache podcast feeds through their servers, which seem to refresh on an hourly basis.
So for example: Let's say PC indexes the RSS feed for NPR's "Up First" podcast at 6:38am. NPR has not yet published that day's episode, but they do so at 6:45am. I can "Pull down to refresh" as much as I want in PC on my phone, but that's just pulling a copy of the cached RSS feed from the PC servers to my phone. Until the PC servers index and re-cache their copy of the RSS feed at 7:38am, PC won't have that new episode.
This probably isn't an issue for most people, but I found it to be annoying enough for me, that I finally moved off of PC to PA. PA pulls the RSS feeds directly from providers to your device, so no caching issues. I've largely been happy with it. I've only found one issue that bothers me with PA, sometimes when re-arranging my queue, I'll accidentally manually start playing something and it switches my queue from the automatically generated one (of downloaded items) to a "Custom" queue with only that item, so no items will autoplay afterwards. Barring that, it's been solid for me.
As a current PocketCast user, thank you for exposing that issue for me. I'm not sure I'm addicted enough to need updates on a faster than hourly basis, but this does explain why updates seem sluggish.
I only ever used the built-in Apple Podcast app. I don’t think I listen to enough podcasts to warrant exploring other apps. I don’t love the app, but I don’t know what I’m missing either. An easier way to manage old episodes would be nice. Say I want to check old episodes and it’s a podcast that’s been on for years, it’s a lot of scrolling. And it defaults to new stuff. I wish I could say “for this podcast, play the old stuff first and ignore new episodes”. Plus some better navigation options. But overall it works fine with the shows I’m up to date on.
The one thing I would want improved in the Apple Podcasts app is the search. I would love for search that could connect my search terms to the content of an episode instead of just the title.
You're right. The search is not great.
I went from overcast to pocketcasts. My gripes with overcast were
The author seems to only listen to podcasts by finishing them to completion but personally I jump around a lot.
To be honest I don’t even understand how people listen to podcasts on playlists. That’s like having a Netflix playlist.
The author doesn’t believe in units tests. Self admitted. So, uh, yeah.
It was sunsetted. iOS app only. It’s not super common but sometimes I’ll want to continue something on a PC.
Had no idea about the units tests, etc. That certainly all seems to make my experiences make a bit more sense. Around the same time the big changes were made to overhaul Overcast's codebase, it never worked properly again for me, even the most basic things were broken, basic enough things that the app was unusable
Also had no idea they dropped the web player. Another reason I'll be sticking with Pocket Casts, then.
The web player was sunset and brought back.
I also had similar instability issues with overcast. However as of the last couple of months the author has been doing a bug stability push. They have also seemed to change their mind about accepting feedback and seem to be much more actively responding publicly and through code changes to bug reports.
It got much more stable for me last month to the point I can go back to not thinking about the application again.
In the early days of podcasts and smartphones I found Pocket Casts, probably recommended by some tech person I was following at the time and I enjoyed it. I was grandfathered into Pocket Casts Plus by being an early user that paid their inexpensive one-time fee at one point. So, mostly I've stayed with them. However, I have tried other things (though specifically on iOS, FWIW), such as Overcast.
I enjoyed Overcast for a while and even preferred it to Pocket Casts, especially when subscribing to "patreon-locked feeds" for particular podcasts that I supported- Pocket Casts didn't handle those well originally, so I looked for alternatives. It was really simple, small-footprint, responsive, and did everything I needed.
However, Overcast in recent months/years became wholly unreliable for me, to the point where new episodes would never show up as "unlistened" or new- the app would just mark them as if I had listened to them, or feeds wouldn't update properly. This was never solved. I would think that my favorite podcasts had stopped releasing episodes, only to find out it was Overcast that was the problem. Even after uninstalling/reinstalling, removing and readding all my casts, and everything.
I tried a few others and either didn't like the UI, or felt like they were missing something in the workflow that frustrated me. So, I jumped back to Pocket Casts, and it finally handled those special patreon feeds fine when I still had them (though I don't anymore), and it's been consistently reliable ever since. Even on iOS, there is nothing else I'd rather use than Pocket Casts at this point. Even if Overcast fixes itself, I'll probably never go back- it burned me too hard and for too long.
I don't have a big need for features- but I am very picky about specific things. Streaming episodes, ease of filtering them, reliable skipping/pausing/etc, reliable queueing, and a UI that feels good to use. I don't need cross platform- though I do appreciate Pocket Casts having a web player if I need it in a pinch.
Edit:
Also, a couple of podcasts I'll recommend:
Doughboys
Stop Podcasting Yourself
Some others I've stopped listening to (either due to time or otherwise) that I still recommend (if they're around):
Jordan Jesse, Go!
I used to listen to so many more podcasts, though I've abandoned a lot of them for one reason or another. Used to be big into the tech and tech-adjacent podcast sphere (TWiT, Revision3, 5by5 Network, Merlin Mann and adjacent characters' stuff), but very little, if any, of that remains in my rotation, and not any I'd feel 100% comfortable recommending.
I also found myself on Pocket Casts as a very early user in 2011 or 2012.
I never really felt 'allegiant' to it, because I didn't need to make an account and I could listen on many platforms.
Today... I find myself annoyed at the lack of spectrum of podcasts I listen to. And worse yet, I abhor the medium as one that I cannot control adblocking over. But I still listen on a daily basis.
I listen to The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (any fellow Quaids?), Good Hang with Amy Pohler, and We Used To Be Spacemen with Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk. The first two have visual components I'd rather not miss, and the last one isn't worth opening a whole separate app and going through its pain in the butt hoopla for, so I watch them all on YouTube on my desktop with my ad-blockers running because Yt can bite my shiny metal ass.
Generally, though, if I ever do go and listen to my old podcasts I use Apple Podcasts, because my list is built up there, it's free for me to use, and it's a decent one that I can control. But most of my podcasts in the traditional format don't require much rewinding and fast-forwarding, because I don't begrudge them their ad revenue.
I doubt they can measure which exact parts of a podcast you listen to. They can only measure downloads in totality, and then of course see how many more people end up buying the advertised product. Not how many exact "listens" a specific ad got.
I used to use Overcast when it first came out, but then it made some changes that I didn’t like, so I moved on to PocketCasts. A couple of days ago, I checked Overcast again, and for the life of me, I can’t understand some of the decisions the app has made (or, rather, the things it hasn't changed since then).
What I want from it is basic functionality: a page that lists all recent episodes in order. If I start playing a podcast and, while listening, add another podcast to the queue, I want the app to switch to the new one (regardless of whether I finish the current podcast or just mark it as done). But I just couldn’t get it to do that.
On paper, the app can do this. It comes with a “Most Recent” playlist that lists episodes in the order they’ve been released. But when I add a new podcast to “Up Next” while listening to another, it moves that episode’s position in the playlist and what’s worse, it doesn’t play it at all after the current episode finishes.
I like the developer and have been listening to the podcast he co-hosts since the very first episode, so I couldn’t bring myself to leave a negative review on the App Store (especially since he’s mentioned how much of an issue this is for him). But, golly, what a mess of an app.
So, I’m back to using PocketCasts, which is fine, but the recent Wordpress stuff left a bad taste in my mouth, so I’ve been testing some alternatives.
Is that the ability to integrate Pocket Casts in to WordPress sites?
I had to so search for it since I rarely look at anything the company does since the app just works for me.
Automattic (owner of WordPress) owns Pocket Casts. Not speaking for the parent comment- but there was a whole debacle involving WP and Automattic's CEO, and historically, at least speaking for myself individually, IMO he's been a rather unsavory character, so I personally hate that fact about Pocket Casts, despite otherwise it being my go-to podcasts app, and I keep forgetting that it was acquired by Automattic.
If any other app worked for my needs as well as Pocket Cast does, I'd abandon it, but so far have not found a solid replacement. I might start looking around again, though.
iOS, I ended up with iCatcher link . Not expensive, and no adverts or anything.
I use iCatcher, the UI isn't beautiful but it functions well enough. I think I switched from Apple Podcasts because I wanted to be able to make playlists of podcast episodes.
Currently I just listen to podcasts to fall asleep... History of Japan and The Explorers Podcast are the best for me. Not that they're boring-- they're actually interesting! But both have speakers with soothing voices and the topics are non-controversial (if the topic is controversial or too relevant to current affairs it keeps my brain too awake).
Other podcasts I'd recommend, not for falling asleep to:
I'm on PocketCasts because it's the first app I found to meet my needs. I think I tried Stitcher when they were around, but they wanted me to create an account and I didn't see the benefit. There's a subscription premium option but none of it seems to be required, just an optional extra.
As for podcasts, I unambiguously recommend Knowledge Fight, a podcast by two stand-up comedians who listen to Alex Jones - one who selects the clips and one who hasn't them before. You'd think this would be a long slog of snark and jokes, but while they're certainly present, Dan (the knowledgeable one) puts in quite a lot of research into the stories Alex twists into far-right propaganda, and also analysis of the state of his business and the behind the scenes drama between Alex, RL events, and his guests in the media space.
In particular I would recommend their coverage of the Jan 6 riot (#517), and/or his staff's very poor attempts to cover their irresponsible coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting in the lawsuit (any Formulaic Objections episode really, but let's say #378) and how they sound very different when presented with a lawyer who can ask logical followup questions.
There are no ads and no sponsors.
In a similar vein, I also recommend QAA (previously called QAnon Anonymous, about a wider range of fringe conspiracy theories including but not exclusive to QAnon), and Weird Little Guys (researched biographies of right wing extremists by the investigative journalist host, delivered in a dryly humourous tone).