Navigation - Pros, Cons, TL;DR & numbered scores will be in bold

I listen to about 40 different podcasts weekly, which comes out to around 3-4 hours every day. I was finally getting tired of Apple Podcasts, so I started searching online for a good alternative. In my search, I found plenty of garbage websites likely written by AI or published by the podcast company itself as a marketing tool. Yay, enshittification of the internet. Like many of you do in similar situations, I sifted through Reddit as well, and found plenty of short threads with good suggestions. But I struggled to find anyone writing more than a few sentences on why they preferred one over the other. This is hands-down my most used app, so I decided to dig in and take this search seriously. Over the past couple of weeks I decided to test out the default Podcast app against two of its biggest competitors - Pocket Casts & Overcast. What follows is I think a pretty exhaustive review of each.

Apple Podcasts

The one I’ve been using the longest, for better and worse. The fact that it took me years to finally move away from it might be all the review you need, because I struggle to think of any app that wouldn’t slowly cultivate my annoyance over the course of years and thousands of hours of use. I swear I’m fun at parties.

There were a couple of reasons I finally decided to look for an alternative. I wake up pretty early on the west coast to walk my dogs, and for some reason Apple Podcasts is god-awful at updating. I think I did everything I could to try to remedy this - clearing out the cache, deleting Podcasts from my feed that I barely listen to, power-cycling, making sure my internet was fast - but reliably I would have to manually open the app, drag to refresh, and wait like two minutes for the app to realize there were in fact new podcasts out. Doing this every day and sometimes multiple times a day is annoying, especially from a company whose motto may or may not still be “It just works” (Maybe not for 15 years, but idc the point stands.)

Another reason I made the switch was this app pretty reliably has audio glitches. Maybe one every two episodes. Which means skipping ahead randomly, or repeating 15 seconds of audio, or random digital noise. Restarting the app would oftentimes fix the issue, but it was still reliably an issue.

This is also a much smaller gripe but why does Smartless stay at the top of my feed? That sucks. I had to unsubscribe because I was tired of looking at their goofy faces, lying about being Recently Updated. For an app whose interface I genuinely enjoy, this struck me as such a stupid money-grab that breaks UI.

I know this is a lot of complaining, but again I used this app for years and enjoyed it for the most part.

Pros:

• Native integration with Siri. This can’t be overstated, and if there’s a way to get other podcast apps using Siri that would be huge. Probably unlikely though. I listen to a lot of podcasts while I’m cooking, and it’s very nice not having to touch my phone to interact with a podcasting app.

• Great discovery tab, not that I need even more podcasts lol.

• Great UI and sleek design that we’ve come to expect from iOS apps. It tickles me when Hosts & Guests pictures show up, often because they’re unflattering or overly professional pictures of people talking about farts or whatever. That feature can also be helpful and save me a Google search of a comedian whose name I know but whose face I can’t place.

• Probably the best place to rate & review podcasts to help the creators out, if you care about that sort of thing.

• It’s got pretty good & neat intuition based on your listening habits w/r/t what podcasts you will always want downloaded and what podcasts you’ve been listening to less, and will stop automatically downloading those.

• No banner ads or monthly/yearly fee

Cons:

• Really slow to update & download, like painfully slow.

• Audio glitches

• Get outta here Smartless, you’re not better than any of my other podcasts

• Limited customization (Classic Apple)

• Will randomly restart a podcast I’m in the middle of

Numbered Scores

UI 8/10

Discoverability 9/10

Playback Controls 6/10

Playback Quality 7/10

Customization 4/10

Ads & Monetization 8/10

Total: 42/60 or a C-

Overcast:

I’ve gotta say, this one surprised me, and not in a good way. It seemed to be a lot of Redditors’ app of choice, so I went in with pretty high expectations. I used it for about a week before getting tired of it. Maybe I didn’t understand it well enough, but I did try really hard to like it. The thing that I simply could not get over was how bad I thought the UI was. And on top of that, how bad customization of that UI is. I feel like I’m missing something, and maybe someone in the comments can help explain what I was doing wrong. But like…wow it’s bad. There’s a “Recent” section that takes up a quarter of the screen, which tells you what podcasts have new episodes, but that’s it. You have to long-press for any actual information on the guest or topic, and if you make the mistake of just pressing it, it starts playing instead of taking you to a detailed episode page. It’s not as egregious but it did remind me of the auto-play feature of so many video streamers that I hate.

Then if you go further down, your options for listing your podcasts are “Current”, “Archive” and “All” with a list-style view as your only option to see them. I much prefer tile-style view, and can’t understand why with all of Overcasts audio customization options, they don’t put a little more effort into letting me customize the UI. Maybe they just want me to customize VIA playlists, but even that comes up short and makes strange decisions as to how many episodes of a podcast it will display (again, only in list view.) I listen to a mix of weekly episodes of some podcasts, and the back-catalog of others. Overcast seems geared more towards current-event podcasts, because trying to mix new and old downloads was like oil and vinegar. It didn’t even consider a 'This American Life' rerun “new” even though it had just been republished. Which like, yes I guess that’s technically correctly, but I’d still consider it a recently updated podcast if that’s the only thing it’s publishing all week.

If there’s a way to get this app to look and act like how I’d want it to, I haven’t figured it out. It doesn’t seem like its Premium option covers the features I’d want either.

Pros:

• Tons of audio customization options

• Other details that they call “nitpicky” that some people will enjoy tinkering with

• Good audio quality

• Fast updating

• Swiping around while navigating is pleasant and can be done from any part of the screen

Cons:

• Awful UI

• No discover feature

• Banner ads (albeit small)

Numbered Scores

UI 2/10

Discoverability NA/10

Playback Controls 10/10

Playback Quality 10/10

Customization 7/10

Ads & Monetization 5/10

Overall Score: 34/60 or an F

Pocket Casts:

After reading some reviews on Reddit, this also came as a surprise, thankfully in a good way. I don’t know the history of this app but it seems like some people were annoyed at how infrequently it was being updated for a while. Looking at it in the app store, it looks like they’ve been on a pretty consistent updating schedule for a while now. Others complained about its widget which had been introduced a couple of years ago. I prefer the 2x2 tile widget for podcast apps, and it’s as good as any other. I will say the 4x2 widget doesn’t seem like it utilizes its space very well, opting for half (4x1) of it to be “discover” which seems unnecessary, and not increasing the size of the play/pause button at all.

In short, this is the podcast app I’ll be using from now on. I really enjoy the condensed tile UI on the main “Podcast” page, and it offers a lot of other UI customization with various filters that I’m grateful for. I like the “In Progress” filter, which isn’t something I’d thought about before seeing it, but actually is a really nice feature since I’ll sometimes go back and forth between a serious and a comedy podcast. The only part of the UI I don’t like is if you press the “Podcasts” category in the lower left while already on the page, it takes you to search and opens up your keyboard. That doesn’t strike me as a very intuitive or necessary use of that button.

I like that from the tile view, clicking on a podcast icon will take you to a somewhat detailed but still economical podcast page that you can further customize. The option to sort AND group is neat and very helpful with podcasts that aren’t current-events. So I can easily see episodes of a podcast I’ve downloaded from as far back as 2018 grouped tightly with this weeks’ episodes for easy viewing of my options. There’s plenty of audio customization available for each podcast, and an option within that settings page to create siri shortcuts for each podcast. Very spiffy.

Pros:

• My preferred UI, along with plenty of further UI customization

• Lots of audio customization as well

• Good audio quality

• Fast updating

• Option to create Siri shortcuts for playing specific podcasts

• A stats page in your profile

Cons:

• Too eager to bring up your keyboard and search bar while navigating the UI

• Selling its “Plus” & “Patron” subscription tiers with a dedicated button on the homescreen and gatekeeping certain features. Honestly I get it though, gotta support yourself and survive against behemoths like Apple & Spotify

• 4x2 widget not very well-designed

Numbered Scores

UI 10/10

Discoverability 8/10

Playback Controls 10/10

Playback Quality 10/10

Customization 10/10

Ads & Monetization 7/10

Overall: 55/60 or an A

Summary:

I know this is only 3 apps, and ignores one of the big players - Spotify. I didn’t review that because I switched to Apple Music after Spotify gave Joe Rogan a bunch of money, and also bought completely gutted Gimlet Media and fired a bunch of really talented people. So, this is relatively niche and obviously very personal, but hopefully will be helpful to some people. Like I said at the top I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my listening habits vary between weekly-updated episodes of certain podcasts, and the back-catalog of other less time-dependant podcasts. Here’s a list of what I listen to in case anyone is curious or feels like judging me/ignoring my opinions based on my listening habits…

The Adventure Zone

The Besties

The Big Picture

Blank Check (and Special Features)

Car Talk (Best of)

Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend

Crooked Media Subscriber Content

Doughboys

Election Profit Makers

The Ezra Klein Show

Fresh Air

Get Played

Go Fact Yourself

Hard Fork

Hollywood Handbook

How Did We Get Weird?

Las Culturistas

Little Gold Men

Lovett or Leave It

Matter of Opinion

Mike Birbiglia Working it Out

My Brother My Brother And Me

NPR Politics Podcast

Offline

Pod Save America

Pod Save the World

The Prestige TV Podcast

Search Engine

Sense Working Overtime

Serial

Smartless

The Sporkful

This American Life

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

Western Kabuki

Who Shat...

Wonderful!

WTF with Marc Maron

You Made it Weird

Let me know if you have questions or feel free to bash me in the comments for fundamentally misunderstanding something! Wouldn’t be the first time. Thanks for reading if you made it this far.

I moved from Apple's podcast app to Google Podcast a few years ago because it integrated well with my Gmail account allowing me to queue up podcasts from my computer to listen to from my phone.

Google announced it's sunsetting their podcast app in favor of YouTube Music which I just don't want to use...so, what's the best podcast app for iPhone?