I’ve been listening to all my shows in Overcast since it came out, but since iOS 13, I thought I’d revisit the old standby default Podcasts app. Feels like a blast from the past in some respects (the difficulty in managing “stations,” the inability to mass mark episodes as played).
But overall, I’m actually quite enjoying it. I love the Siri integration - love AirPlay 2 - show notes look fine. And I don’t miss Voice Boost and Smart Speed nearly as much as I thought I would. In many cases, recording technology has gotten so good that most shows sound uniformly great these days - and it feels like I’m actually hearing a host’s true voice for the first time. PLUS - the Apple Watch playback works outstanding, and it will stream anything that hasn’t been transferred. Chapters? I hardly ever used them anyway.
I’m doing the opposite at the moment. I still prefer the Apple app but since iOS 13 I find that I cannot scroll the show notes without links activating every time I tap to scroll. Was driving me crazy. A bug maybe others have encountered? I’ll likely go back when it’s been fixed.Overcast is a fine app but a bit over-rated in my opinion.
Pocket Casts supports CarPlay, letting you browse podcasts an smart playlists (“filters”) and control playback as well.
I prefer it to Overcast (and it has the same voice boost and trim-silence options as Overcast), and I simply can’t wrap my brain around the workflow in Apple’s app. And since Pocket Casts has a web player and a Mac app and got bought 18 months ago by a consortium of NPR stations, it’s continuing support is assured.
They would have to pry Overcast from my cold dead hands. Absolutely great app; VoiceBoost and SmartSpeed are killer features for me. Marco keeps improving the app in small ways as competition gets closer to feature parity.
I also use Pocket Casts, but I am worried about its purchase by NPR. NPR has introduced and is promoting RAD, a podcasts analytics standard. The RAD analytics standard, if adopted by most podcast client apps, would not be in the interest of the independent podcast producers, the client app developers or the consumers. It would serve the interests only of the large advertisers and the large podcast producers, of which the largest is NPR (link: http://analytics.podtrac.com/industry-rankings/ ). It’s all about money, growth and control for the large podcast producers, paid for by large advertisers.
Marco Arment, developer of the excellent Overcast app described technical details of the proposed RAD standard in the podcast “ATP” (Accidental Tech Podcast) #305. Link: ATP 305: An Uneasy Peace — Accidental Tech Podcast
The NPR/RAD discussion begins at time stamp 47:00. I recommend that those interested in the future of podcasting listen to this informative discussion.
As stated on Podtrac’s website, they’re for podcast publishers. It’s a service that podcasters themselves are using, not Pocket Casts. Podcasters are using services like this more and more frequently because it’s a means of seeing who their audiences are.
You can view the PC privacy policy (as opposed to the FUD of a competitor) to see what information they store about you, but it is essentially only your login information, your subscriptions and playback effects, your filters, and the last time you synced with their server. That’s all if you have a sync account - if you don’t, they have no information stored on you. You can request your GDPR data at any time.
Pocket Casts made perfectly clear that it has no plans to implement RAD.
I just read that in Europe overall and some other countries Spotify has overtaken Apple for podcast delivery. This is pretty interesting because while Apple has no intentions of reintegrating podcasts into its music app, that’s precisely what Spotify is doing… and it’s working for them in a number of ways. For one, it makes Spotify ‘stickier’ for users, who don’t have to use two apps when one will give them their audio. Second, pushing podcasts to its users saves Spotify payouts customers otherwise would have made them make to musical performers by listening to songs.
Pandora started adding podcasts too, but they’re walking dead at this point. But between Apple’s free app, Spotify and apps like Stitcher which offer a lot of premium content (and detailed analytics to advertisers), smaller independent podcast app developers are in jeopardy unless they’re bankrolled or otherwise have additional funding streams.
IIRC Marco said he has a clear path for AirPlay 2 with Overcast - that was the only thing I was “missing” e.g. there’s a delay in Overcast when playing on the HomePod or Apple TV. Hopefully it’s fixed by the end of the year.
Oh, another problem I’ve noticed with the Apple app and wonder if anyone else is seeing this. I tend to use my iPhone for most daily podcast playing. If I should go to one of the iPads after a couple days away it will refresh the updated episodes as expected. But the app becomes completely unresponsive during this and it seems to take quite awhile. By contrast, Overcast seems much more responsive during such updates and does not seem to take as long.
It let’s you create stations which are similar to playlists… maybe the same. I’ve not done much with them but with a station you can add a podcasts. As each new episode comes in you’ll find it in the station. So, a subgroup of podcasts? Not sure how customizable it is beyond that.
Interesting, over here they have the woeful BBC Sounds app that they hide exclusive editiions of podcasts in, so not sure they truly support the open nature of podcasting.
