Overcast

It’s a very good app, however I am sticking with Pocket Casts until Marco finally adds the ability to skip chapters with AirPods. This is a feature that all the decent podcast players have. Pocket Casts also has a much better Apple Watch app where you can move episodes around queues.

Stable, fast en customizable.

The sleep timer buttons need better contrast in dark mode (often used at lowest brightness!) and when the sleep timer has run down to 00:00, the audio should gracefully fade out instead of being cut off. Changing to 2 stars and reminding myself to update it to a higher rating later - by Marco’s own admission this seems to have a higher chance of being read than email feedback, so… love ATO & Overcast though!

I have used Overcast since at least 2016 now. And although the original Apple podcast app has improved, it is still no match for the userfriendliness and useability of Overcast. Many settings are customizable, to make this app work for whatever way you like to listen to podcasts.

Lots of small issues have been fixed since the big update, but the whole reason for this app is to download/stream podcasts. And it stops doing this after you lock your screen while a pod is playing.

The app has finally gone to being usable again. Unfortunately, still not many new features since rewrite even though they was the big goal that those would be added quicker. I will give 5 star if queue based workflow will finally have better support (manage queue with much less taps). Also, there is a lot of micro stutter when scrolling long list. This is not acceptable in 2024 (iPhone 15 pro).

After a pause Overcast can’t restart, instead my music starts playing. Looks like Overcast crashes or is shutdown. Also after a notification it sometimes crashes. And episodes sometimes stop mid episode, after which the next one starts… Irritating: I filled a playlist, but once in awhile after I return to the app all episodes are gone.

Many bug, including playback right at the end it doesn’t finish and removes it from the list. Further the chapter screen is horrible and you keep clicking on these external links instead of the time stamps. The contrast of dark mode is not correct, you often hit the wrong button. Sound and Chapter icon look too much the same and too small tap size. List goes on.

Much better than Apple podcast app, in my opinion. Plus, cross platform syncing works better than syncing between my mac and iphone.

Update: things seem to have been improving, it’s been a while since I’ve experienced what described below. Awesome. Used to be decent, but highly suffering from a revolution that was too big to pull off by a single developer. While some bugs and inconsistencies are a fine, it doesn’t reliably do one thing: play podcasts. Either it doesn’t downlod, or stream, or stops playing out of nowhere and loses playback position. It’s hard to care about UI improvements when the basics don’t work well enough.