As always, developers / product owners get to decide the direction a product takes. Good product owners track the market, competitors, what customers want… but strike their own path to produce the product they want to make. It may be that they leave money on the table, or have a smaller potential audience because of it, but that’s their choice.
It’s also a massive downside of current software in that it’s rarely possible to stick with a version of software that you like as the underlying technology changes, APIs, Development suites, servers. 20 years ago you could just use what you bought and never update it.
For many reasons, newer software is infinitely better, but it does also have downsides.
I think this is good. Heavy listeners spend enough time that it’s worth a little periodic evaluation. Plus, podcast apps are an interesting design challenge (to me.)
Agreed. It’s been an interesting experience using multiple over the last few weeks and seeing some brilliant ways of solving problems and some real head scratchers. If only we could make a “best of” and have the ultimate app!
I’m in the listen in the background youtube camp. I listen to news, reviews, and even history channel type videos while cooking, going for a walk, shopping, etc. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks in same way,
I generally only watch youtube when sitting still for a meal.
It helps that I subscribe to youtube so I can download videos for offline access and they can play even while my phone is locked.
You should post, open and respectful discussion makes us all better, and I’m honestly keeping an open mind because we are another month down the line and Overcast still doesn’t have a watch app that anyone should use (the current one is causing all kinds of problems due to it been the old sync engine, specifically playlist issues).
Just out of interest, what app did you move to, I’ve had Pocketcast and Castro on my phone for months (even in the betas for both and have a subscription to Castro)…I listen to a few post casts in each of them every now and again just to see how they are progressing. Here are my current thoughts:
Castro is let down by lack of client options and sync between client installs. Specifically I enjoy listening using my MacBook or iPad at my desk, and my iPhone when on the move. This isn’t possible with Castro. The queue system is the best on the market, the approach really does align with how I would like to use Overcast (I’ve re-created a piss poor version in overcast with the Queue and Priority Podcasts). I’d love to see swipe gestures in play lists to quickly triage & the overall UX appearance lacks polish IMHO. In terms of price, Castro is Au$39.99 v Overcast Au$22.99, so almost double the price.
PocketCasts (that I used as my primary client for some years in the past) is also excellent, I love the Podcast tab view, especially with the new sort by recently played. Filters are good and the up-mext (queue) is fairly well implemented, however lacks the ability to quickly triage from the “up next” list (you can swipe to remove an episode, however can’t mark is as played…this is very annoying to me). I’ve had sync issues, I’ve had client stability issues and the overall audio quality for the trim silence (smart speed equiv) isn’t as good as Overcast. I also don’t appreciate the hard up-sell in the product with smart folders, where it asks if you want to set them up, and goes to the subscription page (it’s happened twice in the last few minutes as I was checking things in the app). It is also expensive comparatively, PocketCast Au$59.99 a year compared to Overcasts $22.99.
The biggest and most important feature for me, is the addition of history and restore of previous playback position. I often listen to Podcasts to help me sleep, addition of this feature in Overcast was a game changer.
I use Castro and generally like it. I agree that if you’re someone who thinks in the right way, the Castro queue system is superb. Overcast - whatever its other faults - was never designed with that system mind. The Castro UI feels dated when compared to Overcast though and has its own rough edges.
As you say there’s no Castro Mac app, but don’t forget that you can use iPhone mirroring to use it on the Mac.
Castro has a simple version of this. If you restart a podcast half way through, let it play to the end (because you fell asleep), then play it again from your history list, it will restart from that last midway start point, not the beginning. I find this works well when listening to podcasts in bed.
I don’t have an Apple Watch myself — but here’s some tidbits from TestFlight:
This build:
Watch app: Fixed “Error loading data”.
Playlists: Fixed a bug that could reorder consecutive episodes of a podcast after one was deleted.
Other builds in this series:
Completely rewrote the Apple Watch app with the new sync engine and Apple’s latest Watch-app architecture to be MUCH more responsive, efficient, and reliable
Disabled Lock Screen time-slider by default to reduce accidental seeking (previously in Nitpicky Details, now in regular Settings
Migrated entire app to SwiftUI lifecycle, improving launch time and other minor behaviors
I’ve got the beta running, personally don’t use overcast on my watch, however did run it up with the initial beta. It’s better but still under early stage development, so a few rough edges. It does look promising.
Seems a few folks have found playlist sorting issues (that thankfully I’ve not experienced at all) are resolved.
It’s a fairly big release / update, and so fair fairly stable for me.
I’ve had pretty much no issues with Overcast. Apart from the minor annoyance of some buttons being moved around after so many years, I’ve only run into one real problem: some episodes would start playing for about 10 seconds, then suddenly get marked as played and skip to the next one. That hasn’t happened in a while though, so it might be fixed by now.
New “feature”: Forced episode limits. Do you enforce your episode limits? This might be a solution for some, it’s devastating for me. Every time I open the app I get prompted now to delete episodes exceeding the limit. But I need it that way: I set a limit on how many new episodes to download, but I manually select and download old episodes I want to hear. I have a lot of podcasts where I don’t necessarily listen to each new episode, as they cover different topics and I just select the ones concerning those I’m interested in. Some go way back.
I found no way to turn this off, only workaround seems to be to change the episode limit for these podcasts, meaning they will keep downloading new stuff that I don’t need, then I’ll need to delete episodes when storage gets tight, then I’ll have to weed through everything again, checking if it’s an episode I deliberately downloaded from the back catalogue or if it’s a new one.
This doesn’t seem as much like a new feature as making an old feature work the way it probably should have worked all along.
I’ve never used episode limits. Everything is “unlimited”. If I add a new podcast, it downloads the most recent episode. You have to manually pick other ones to download. And anything I download stays put.
If I don’t want NEW episodes, I just uncheck the “Following” button in the episode list screen for a given podcast. You can have the old stuff sitting around without getting new stuff.
But I don’t to unfollow. I want it to download the newest episode but not pile up endlessly. And in addition I want to keep selected episodes from the back catalogue that I chose. It worked well for me. Maybe I‘m special, but why can’t I just dismiss the message? It really wants to enforce it. This means I have to either unfollow or manually change the episode limit each time I decide to dig into the back catalogue.
Or don’t set an episode limit for those podcasts, and set yourself a weekly reminder to delete/mark listened to episodes you’re not going to listen to.
Marco did explain this recently on ATP. The logic became increasing complex and different people have different interpretations of how the app should handle the situation when (for example) someone has limited to 3 episodes and then with the 3 latest episodes downloaded, downloads something from the back catalogue. Should it ignore the limit for old downloads (some people expected it to), should it immediately delete the oldest episode (some people wrote to Marco complaining that the limit wasn’t working).
Marco was getting feedback both ways and confusion over how it worked.
His wife came up with the current solution. It’s simple, elegant, and can’t be misinterpreted. You can remove the dialogue, but it means switching the limitation off.
Another option which just occurred to me may help you.
There used to be services online which would allow you to listen to a podcast on a delay e.g. if you’ve come to a podcast a while into it’s run, you could schedule it to deliver episodes as if the run started today, so if you were 3 years behind, you could always be 3 years behind. The time was configurable.
If they still exist and you can find such a service, you could have the native feed with a number downloaded limitation for new episodes and then use a feed delayed by 1 day (or whatever other time you wanted) to download older episodes.
It means you’d have two timelines but it could be a way to achieve what you’re looking for.
Everyone hates the strict episode limits, so they’re gone!
Now you have visibility and manual control over which episodes are being excluded from the limit, indicated by a diamond-plus in the status label in the episode’s cell. In the queue (…) menu on each episode cell, you can toggle this state. It’s set by all of the previous paths — manually adding/downloading/playing an episode — and now also if an episode is manually added to a playlist.
There’s also now a Set All button in the Episode Limit settings screen.
I am happy with Apple Podcasts for some time now (sometimes I miss Overcast’s audio improvements, but overall it just works for me), so I do not have any more firsthand experience, but I really do get his frustration. Overcast has an audience that is very diverse with a lot of expectations and totally different “workflows”. Marco Arment has built a lot of granular controls into Overcast. He absolutely cannot get it right for everyone. It can’t be done. Even if he wanted to.
(…) I’ve needed to evolve my expectations for what my role in Overcast is.
After building up a large, passionate userbase over a very long time, it’s not really entirely mine anymore. I can’t just do whatever I want with it.
And the growth era of open/RSS/indie/whatever podcast apps is over. The business is now about serving and retaining my existing customers for as long as possible.
So I can add things here and there, very carefully, but I can’t really change anything significant.
This has been difficult for me to accept, and I’m still not great at it, but I’m getting there.
