Still loyal to Overcast. It does what I need it to do and Marco does an excellent job of addressing the little things that make it better than most any other one. www.overcast.fm
I’m always stuck between Pocket Casts and Overcast. The easy answer is Overcast if you prefer the quality of audio, smart speed features, etc. and Pocket Casts if you prefer better filtering, universal support, it has a PC and Mac app as well. The main drawback to Overcast for me is the UI, it’s in need for some serious updating. I have around 500 podcasts and overcast really has problems trying to keep up and seriously lags at times. Also the UI looks extremely dated.
Agreed re: managing many episodes/series in Overcast. Why Marco spent over a year on Voice Boost 2 instead of giving us folders, tags, or something better than this massive list, I’ll never understand.
1 Like
I’m pretty irritated by Overcast’s UI bugs, and I don’t like that he hates interacting with customers, so I don’t do the legwork to document and submit them. I’d love for him to be more productive in that area in 2020. I haven’t felt the organization pain because I unsubscribe to a lot of podcasts instead of triaging them, but I’d like folders and tags very much.
I re-downloaded Overcast to try out the touted improved audio but I did not hear any edge over Pocket Casts, at least the way I listen to podcasts: most at a minimum 1.2x with Trim Silence on.
With the BBC as the latest large media group investing in Pocket Casts and its having a team of devs working on it, its future is pretty secure, and I’m happy with it despite some irritations like the continued inability to sort podcasts by length.
Yes, it’s a very minimal change. However if you go over 1.2x you can easily tell the audio quality in Overcast’s ‘smart speed’ vs Pocket Casts ‘trim silence’ feature. Pocket casts starts to sound a little chipmunky at the higher speeds. I’m not knocking Pocket Casts here because it’s overall my top choice and miles ahead from a UI standpoint. Overcast feels like an app that’s years old.
Where’s that sync feature? Does it remember the position in a podcast?
Yes, Pocket Cast does remember it’s position. And you don’t have to turn it on, as in there’s no button to turn this. It just work. Of course, you have to create an account and login.
1 Like
Ah you’re talking about Pocketcasts. I thought you were referring to Castro. It still doesn’t have any (reliable?) sync features.
ha ha … that was a year ago and I have since used Pocketcast because of this sync issue with Castro:
Resurrecting this thread. Are there any new podcast apps worth looking at? I’m especially interested in apps which include a Watch app and are flexible on playback speeds (I like 1.7x)
I was a long-term paying Castro user (and love the queuing system) but switched to PocketCasts because of Castro’s many bugs and the absence of active development.
I think PocketCasts is great, but it has a major bug in its carplay implementation which I reported to Pocketcasts a long while back, and remains unfixed. (When Waze issues a sound-based alert e.g. for an upcoming hazard or speed camera, PocketCasts ignores its own settings, and the podcast continues running silently in the background, so you miss several seconds of podcast on every alert)
On iOS my only considerations would ever be, and in this order:
- Pocket Casts
- Overcast
- Castro
If Castro hadn’t gone dark for a year and been more communicative with its users, it could very well be #1.
Given your issue with PC though, I think that leaves Overcast.
I don’t personally love the workflow in Overcast and the design looks old and basic. But the sound quality is really good - so that’s my reco for you. 
yeah - I had a long look at Overcast, but the queueing system — which works so well in Castro and PocketCasts — doesn’t work at all in Overcast. There’s not even a ‘kludge’ unless you’re willing to spend a lot of extra taps manually managing playlists.
2 Likes
Overcast is actively developed and supported; there have been several updates just this year, including an icon & UI refresh.
I’m clueless and not asking anyone to write a lengthy reply. What makes these better than the Apple Podcasts app for a basic podcast user? I mostly listen in the car through Car Play. TY!
1 Like
I think that for most people who move away from Apple’s Podcast app, there’s one tentpole feature that makes it worth the switch.
For me, that’s Smart Speed in Overcast. The runner-up would be the ability to load my own audio files into their app (I have some purchased audio dramas and training audio files that are outside the podcast ecosystem). Yes, I could listen to them in various other ways, but it’s worth it to me to have all of my short-form listening in one app.
5 Likes
I prefer using Siri to control play/pause/skip etc. when I’m listening to podcasts, and Siri sucks less when trying to control the Apple Podcast app.
IMO AP has progressed from a dumpster fire to a cluttered but satisfactory podcast player.
1 Like
Smart speed with good audio quality, boosting/leveling voices, feed triage, chapter skipping, custom uploads, skipping x seconds into new episodes, per-show defaults for all of that. Custom Siri commands are nice, too (haven’t tested beyond Overcast and Castro but they have a lot of hooks for Siri.)
To @shandy’s question, I’ve wanted to see new entrants that care about good queueing and feed power management, but it seems like new podcast clients with heavy development are prioritizing AI features. I can’t blame them but…that’s not for me, especially since it became easy to have Whisper auto-chug through folders of audio files.
1 Like
time to try out Castro and maybe PocketCast I guess…