Yes I have Overcast’s subscription as well, I just tend to do all of this from an iPhone, hence Castro. Overcast indeed has made some real decent strides. I’ve never heard of Downie, though. Might be interesting to check out. Thanks for the suggestion.
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well it seems like they are fixing bugs but there is absolutely no response whatsoever on Castro support mail, twitter or otherwise.
I really like Castros queue and inbox design. it is perfect for me. but currently Castros seems to have problems with certain feeds I listen to. I’ve sent support tickets.
If I’m lucky they are working on it but who knows… 
I think Pocket Casts might be your best bet at this point, if Castro isn’t working for you anymore. Similar queue/inbox design.
I’ve found Overcast can be made to work with something close enough to Castro’s queue/inbox.
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Update - in contact with support. Promising
I got an email from support inviting me to directly email two of the devs. I’ve also seen Mohit (lead dev) ask for direct emails to him on Twitter. It makes me wonder if there’s something inconvenient about the support email address for the current team. Customers directly emailing three developers seems worse than fixing it…
I think Castro is close to being abandonware. I long ago switched to Pocetcasts and love the crossplatform support including MacOS and Alexa
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Yeah, they went dark for a year. Then they came back with a buggy update a few weeks ago that wasn’t up to snuff - my opinion. Hearing lots of people say they’ve gone dark again.
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They did get back to me with an email response just a few hours after I had sent a bug their way, but…think I am sticking with Overcast. The support feels like an afterthought, not proactively problem-solving. I don’t like to say that because it is a beautiful app, and has that Inbox feature but, yes, overall feeling like going dark again.
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If they were responsive and had a community (Reddit, their own site, whatever) - they could be the best app. Lost potential for sure
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So, the initial Castro release was shaky but ended up being really good. They’ve done nine updates since the big one at the start of the year, which, on the one hand, it would have been better if they needed fewer, and on the other hand, they’re working hard and the stability is back.
The most recent update introduces custom folders, which builds on the new category feature. Like with categories, the queue is still the home of episodes you’re going to listen to, but you can filter the queue down to the episodes in the folder or pick an episode to play from it.
It seems episodes can be added to multiple folders which is more tag-like. The only one I need so far is for family-friendly episodes (this was the use case I focused on when I requested this feature.)
I’ve asked them to let certain podcasts be auto-saved to folders; we’ll see what happens.
Thankful for this app and the time and taps it saves me. I’m glad they didn’t make me leave.
I’m tempted, but I think I have settled into a good process with Overcast.
With Overcast, I used to worry about filling up the iPhone with unlistened-to-episodes, because I subscribe to more podcasts than I will ever have time to listen to. But then I realized that there’s a somewhat hidden button that lets you purge your Overcast storage. So if storage becomes an issue, I can just purge everything and start over with new episodes.
And thank you for that update!
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Yes, sorry, didn’t mean to tempt! Just inform. I know most are happy where they’re at and/or angry at Castro and/or sick of podcasts.
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How is everyone liking the Apple Podcast App on iOS17?
It is missing Trim Silence feature. Other than that, I like and it works smoothly in Car Play unlike Castro.
Does it have volume leveling like Castro and Overcast do? Curious.
I have switched to pocket cast and I have been very happy with the app. It has everything I need.
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Damn, that’s a shame. I love Castro… when it works. Time to move on, I guess. I just downloaded Overcast. I’ll try it out for while to see if I like it.
Castro claim they are working on the problem
https://x.com/CastroPodcasts/status/1729734089656406430
However, I’ve had enough. Castro has been a buggy mess for a long time.
After trying-and-failing to recreate Castro’s brilliant queuing system in other apps (especially Pocketcasts and iCatcher), I came back to Castro after it relaunched under the new ownership. But it has remained buggy and unreliable.
I’ve abandoned the dream of the queuing system, and resigned myself to Overcast.
They only posted that update because Mohit elbowed them and didn’t deny the shutdown claim. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet. There are a lot of shows that I can’t stay subscribed to without triage tools (some I just read the episodes that come through and never listen.) Hopefully someone is inspired by this opening to imitate or go deeper into that style of podcast management. Too bad Readwise Reader’s been slowed down by their performance refactor…
I had no idea podcast support was even on the Readwise roadmap! That is great news. I’ve just searched for it on their Discord, and found the reference.
It really is a shame nobody else does this type of podcast triage/management. Pocketcasts comes very close, but suffers from a longstanding bug which renders it unusable alongside Waze (or any other navigation apps) in Carplay.
Overcast is — for me — the least bad option for the moment, but a far cry from the promise of a less-buggy Castro.
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