I Need a Better Podcast App (Premium)

I’ve long used and recommended Pocket Casts, but it’s become a confusing and complex mess. I need something better. By which I mean simpler.

It should be so simple: All a podcast app really needs to do is provide a way to subscribe to podcasts, manage automatic downloading of new episodes and the removal of episodes you’ve listened to, provide cloud-based sync for multiple device usage, and deliver a clean, clear interface.

PocketCasts fails on many levels but mainly because its user interface has become needlessly complex. And I can no longer tell at a glance whether I’ve already listened to particular episodes of a given podcast. This is bad enough in general, but it’s a huge problem when I’m in the car or out walking and just want to get on with what it is I’m doing, not stop and have to scrutinize the app to figure out what’s new (to me) and what’s not.

This has come to a head recently because I’ve recently started binging a podcast that has 40-ish episodes that have been released over the past two years or so. I intend to eventually listen to every episode, but I’ve been cherry-picking the ones I’m most interested in first. So understanding, at a glance, which episodes are new (to me) and which are not is key. As is knowing which episodes are downloaded to the device and which are not.

Pocket Casts does not differentiate between those episodes I’ve listened to and those I have not. Its visual indicators for the time remaining in partially completed podcasts, like that for those episodes that are downloaded, are too small to be useful. And the options in its swipe-based episode gestures are simple icons that in many cases give so obvious hint at their usage. As noted, the app is just a mess.

There’s also another weird bug in Pocket Casts where the Chromecast icon won’t appear on the Now Playing screen all the time, making it impossible to cast a podcast to a speaker as I do when I shave/clean up in the morning. This is getting increasingly frustrating as well.

So I’ve been looking around.

And as you will find with a simple Google search, there are lots of podcast app solutions out there, many of which work across both Android and iOS. Most people probably don’t have that particular need, I guess, but I could imagine someone owning an Android phone and an iPad, so it’s generally useful. And in my case, it’s a requirement.

I also personally prefer a standalone podcast app as opposed to using a music app---like Google Play Music or Spotify---that also provides podcast support. Music and podcasts are two different things, to my mind.

Last year, Google broke out a standalone podcasting app from its Google Home/Google Assistant apps and services, and I feel like this may eventually evolve into the app I want. As it stands today, however, Google Podcasts doesn’t provide any sort of auto-download functionality at all, which is ridiculous. (It can automatically clean up episodes...