Marco was one of my biggest inspirations to become a software engineer. I worked in the same office as he and David Karp and was there when they launched Tumblr. I spent many lunch breaks picking David and Marco’s brains about the work they were doing. Many years later, I mustered the courage to switch careers and become a web developer. I’m now a full-stack dev at O’Reilly Media. It’s not glamorous but I am very proud of the work I do. Cheers to Marco!
For Android users, I highly recommend Podcast Addict, which also seems to be the work of a single dev. It's incredibly good and constantly getting new features.
The good third party apps are leaps better than the platform official apps. The developers are passionate and the platform apps seem unwilling to risk adding too many features.
Good lord, thank you for this thread. I stopped listening to podcast because apple's podcast app became insufferable. I had no idea there was an alternative like this. This app is amazing.
To be fair, Apple almost certainly has more than one developer working on theirs, so it is probably almost impossible to maintain any kind of real quality over time.
When I started using an iPhone for the very first time, Overcast was the first app that I actually paid for. Marco is a long-time iOS developer/MACOS developer and has been an indie dev since the very early days of the Appstore. He also was one of the very early critique of Apple's draconian App Store rules policies. I liked Overcast and was a difficult decision to switch to Android as I can't seem to find an equally good podcast app. welp. Updated. Thanks zillion for the kind souls who linked to Pocketcasts from Automattic. Downloaded and happy.
Been using Overcast pretty much since it launched and I've also be listening to Marco's Accidental Tech Podcast for even longer. A bunch of changes over the years but still love the smart speed and other features. Glad to see indie developers can still make a sustainable living in the App Store!
I stuck with Apple podcasts for a few years because I wanted to be able to sync progress between my Mac and my phone.
That basically never worked and in fact kept resetting my progress. Eventually I got so fed up I realized I wasn’t listening on the Mac anyway because of it and switched to Overcast.
Pretty quickly I regretted not switching earlier. I’ve been using it very happily ever since.
on M1/2 Macs Overcast can be installed from the app store. No special work by Marco; it's just the ipad UI, but that's more than enough to have your listen status sync across all your devices and make your podcasts available on the mac.
AntennaPod (for Android) is also fine. I briefly switched to android, and the lack of a working podcast app for iOS was one of the main things that delayed my switch back.
(I am happily using overcast now, but am bummed that I can’t browse my podcasts via my car’s bluetooth, like I could with android.)
It's what I use as well. It's fine, I use it because it has no ads but it doesn't always behave as expected. One example... When you're in a podcast and you swipe back, it closes down the app instead of going to the main screen where you have all your subscribed pods.
Same. I tried Overcast and liked much about it. I still like PocketCasts better though probably mostly because it’s familiar. If I wasn’t on the lifetime plan, I’d go with Overcast but for me I’m sticking with PocketCasts.
I paid for pocket casts a while back too when it was a one time payment. You are grandfathered in? What benefits did you grandfathered into? I don’t see any acknowledgment of my legacy status.
I've been using Podcast Addict for years and I love it. It was missing one thing that I wanted (sorting podcasts by fewest unlistened-to episodes), so I put in a feature request and it got added after a few weeks!
Same here. I wanted to filter a feed to only get the episodes longer than XX minutes and the developer told me on Twitter that the feature was added pretty recently.
That's also the only app I'm a paid subscriber just to support its development.
+1 for Castro. I can't believe more podcast apps haven't caught on to how handy the email-like metaphor is for managing episodes.
I want to listen to some, but not all episodes that come in via my various feeds, so having an "inbox" of sorts from which I can either download or discard shows seems like the only reasonable way to handle things IMHO. I don't understand apps that just download everything or, like Overcast, mess around with playlists.
I agree, although a lot of listeners do listen to every episode of every show they subscribe to. It's just a personal choice.
I still use Overcast, though, but mimic the Castro behavior to a certain extent by having a "Latest" playlist and a "Starred" playlist. I look at "Latest" every day, star the ones I want to listen to, then eventually play from Starred.
This works fine for me, but probably skews the shows' stats a bit since I download many more episodes than I ever listen to.
I chucked an Overcast ad on for my podcast (now faded, cohost had a kid and now has no time). It exploded and word of mouth kept it going.
It was still seeing healthy downloads 2 years after we stopped. Admittedly that was likely more SEO than the initial ad but I'd have never put that much effort in without an early audience.
We had people talking to us about our thing on Twitter! People who weren't friends and family!! What a buzz.
I don't know AntennaPod but the reason that I use Overcast is that it has three important features:
1) Adjustable playback speed. Probably other apps have this but my default is 1.75X So an hour podcast is cut down to more like 40 minutes.
2) Smart Speed. Takes out silences.
3) Skip intros, outros, etc. on a per-podcast basis.
Another great feature is skipping ahead 30 seconds for two clicks (fast forward) on my AirPods Pro.
I do find that I have to listen on AirPods Pro because the speed of the conversations is too fast for regular speakers, meaning I have to focus a fair amount on the podcast. Maybe other people don't have that problem.
One great feature is it has server-side crawling, but it is a good internet citizen and isn't trying to abandon the RSS feed podcast standard, and make podcasts proprietary to one particular platform like many other podcast apps.
