New Overcast app

Software
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99.9% of my use of Overcast is on my phone, so sync hasn’t been a big issue for me.

The first thing that comes to mind (for me) is that the amount of times that background sync can operate (unless something has changed and I’ve missed it) is based on how much you use an App. I find this when I occasionally open Overcast on my ipad and see episodes which are months old which I’ve already listened to. But I don’t need to do a manual refresh, it refreshes on opening and is quickly up to date.

Marco himself has never seemed particularly confident about his own Watch app. He’s always claimed that this is due to limitations on the watch. I can understand that, watchOS is very careful with app useage and kills apps in the background if it feels they’re being too aggressive.

On Support, I think it’s a really poor deal that Marco said he wasn’t even going to read email feedback on the new version of his app. For the record, I’ve also had similar experiences with _David Smith (pre Stephen Hackett being involved) where support queries received no feedback at all despite functionality appearing to be broken.

I understand for both of them that they’re independent developers and time is precious, their “model” is obviously working for them though as they still have businesses.

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I will say… I did not realize how much the Overcast audio features were improving the mixing of some of my favorite podcasts. Holy cow, some supposedly “professional” podcasters have wildly variable audio and some folks are nearly inaudible. OMG. It almost makes Overcast a necessity for me… going to stick out playing with Apple Podcasts for a bit, but wow…

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126

Thanks for the feedback @geoffaire. I switch between devices a lot, so sync is important to me, and I agree with your other points, too.

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Pocket Casts has volume leveling as well. I absolutely agree - some podcast audio is absolute trash without it. :slight_smile:

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What a load of … (fill in your favorite term here) …

This. Shipping for the sake of shipping it never a good rationale to ship.

Then tell people this is what you are doing and why, and label this release as a beta release.

We just released a major update to one of our products. And we know that there are issues. We did several things including:

  1. We told our users of the known issues, and our plans to address them.
  2. We told our users that this was a beta release.
  3. We respond to all feedback.

While we have the staff to do this, as I noted in a post above, the best practices for this stuff are known. And not that hard to follow. Even for a one person shop.

And the reaction from our users, despite the issues, has been positive overall.

Communication with users can change the narrative dramatically. I’ve been in software development for some time now (retirement is looming!), and the difference between telling users about issues versus the users finding the issues is often night and day. The narrative changes from “they’re on top of things” to “what else is wrong”. Honesty and transparency go a long way here.

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Just out of curiosity, when you say “normal” priority way up above, is that basically everything that you haven’t manually assigned to “High” and “Low”?

I have everything working in PocketCasts currently, but I’m playing with the new Overcast as the features fill in.

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Yes, exactly that. High / Normal / Low. It works perfectly :grinning:

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Any one having issues with podcasts not adding to lists or queue. I thought I was crazy because a few would not add here and there but would go back and re add and worked. But now I have 2 poscasts that I follow that won’t allow any episodes to be added to any lists. Tried deleting, unfollowing, etc and still no luck.

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One more random thing I noticed - that “announcements” section that was added to Overcast, interestingly enough, doesn’t contain any of the bug fix announcements that have been posted on Mastodon. The only thing it contains is the launch announcement.

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Mastodon :roll_eyes:

I’ve tried a few times but I just can’t. Anyway, they need a more reliable, widely used platform to post updates.

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I don’t use it either. The only time I’ve gone there in recent memory is to see whether Marco had updated anything about the status of Overcast. :slight_smile:

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This is the ironic part. Builds a comms system into the product. Doesn’t use it.

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I’ve not had that problem, but there may be a difference in how we’re using the product.

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Marco talked about Overcast in “Under the Radar” again:

This time he said that he hardly received any feedback which he did not already get from the tiny private beta group? (Did I hear that right?)

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If this is true, he released while knowing that Playlists were broken. WTF!

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“Not having a big public beta for my rewrite really didn’t affect it at all. There was no feedback that I got from a bigger group that I didn’t get from my beta testers, from even having a small beta of I think it ended up being something like 40 people. I got all the same feedback that I got later from the bigger release and the bigger group.”

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Well if you do this …

… then yeah for sure this would be true …

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Incidentally, on ATP they are talking about this this week as well. It’s a longer discussion, but the consensus seems to be that Marco is getting dragged in App Store reviews primarily because people hate the fact that he changed the UI.

He seems to think it is a small but vocal minority, and that he just needs to get the majority of customers that are happy to leave reviews.

I have no idea whether he is correct or not, but I can say that the UI itself is one thing that I haven’t had any complaints about - other than features that are outright missing.

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I downloaded the update as soon as I heard him talking about it on ATP. Initially, I had issues with the UI, specifically the chapters/skip, show notes, and the play lists. I’ve gotten use to the new method for accessing chapters and skipping. I don’t look at show notes that often, so that one may take a bit to stick. For the play lists, I renamed my lists to put numbers in front so they show up in the order I want. Between the new update and the numbers, this has fixed an issue I had with using play lists in CarPlay. They work much better now in CarPlay than even before the update. I also haven’t noticed the Chapter list cutting off in CarPlay like it did in the old version. Overall, I think the rewrite is good, but I almost never used Streaming, which is no longer offered, and seldom use the Sleep Timer, which apparently some are having trouble finding.

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What I find desperately lacking in the new Overcast is some granular control over what gets downloaded. I have just discovered over 20 GBs of downloaded podcasts on a device where I’ve set podcasts to download automatically just for testing. While one can set a limit per podcast, there’s no global setting as in the previous version (where it was under Nitpicky details). ‘Delete after 24 hours’ is still broken, as are many features that are supposedly in the app but don’t seem to be working.

I’ve also used streaming previously, and while I can live without it, some very long podcasts also take a very long time to download unless you have perfect cellular reception. These downloads also get interrupted if iOS kills Overcast, requiring multiple retries. That’s not a good user experience. In fact, it’s a terrible user experience.

I know, as they say, that this is not an airport, and there’s no need to announce departures, but I’m done with Overcast and have moved everything into Pocket Casts.

While the new Overcast may run on technically superior internals, it is broken and has suffered a massive feature regression to meet the developer’s arbitrary deadline, which no one cared about.

Marco lives in his echo chamber of close friends (and, apparently, not so committed or particularly good and thorough beta testers) on Mastodon, does not care about feedback, and, given that he’s not worried in the slightest by the recent update getting an average of 1.9 stars in the App Store (which he dismisses as being just a bunch of whiners), I’m not holding much hope for Overcast ever getting back the features that were removed. Three updates that were out after this release have barely fixed anything, and have not brought any removed features back.

Ironically, Marco and David Smith (Widgetsmith, Pedometer) fuel each other’s massive confirmation bias on the Under the Radar podcast that everything’s fine and that feedback does not need to be read and processed in its entirety, whereas they’ve always been so vocal to criticise Apple for every single minor issue in the OS.

At the end of the day, this is just a tool. If it works, great. If it no longer serves a purpose or is broken, it can be easily replaced. A good product manager would understand this.

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