Poke around the settings and you’ll find handy toggles for cellular syncing, seek acceleration, and rotation lock, as well as customizable forward and rewind buttons and advanced remote controls. Unless you happen to hate the color orange, you’ll love Overcast’s meticulous layout. It’s not just the easy navigation and big, bold controls Overcast has an attention to detail unlike any other podcast app. Impeccably crafted and thoughtfully designed, Overcast’s interface makes searching and listening to podcasts an absolute pleasure. Overcast (free, with $5 in-app purchase) was built for the best possible reason: Its developer, Instapaper creator Marco Arment, couldn’t find a client that fit his specific needs.
Instacast 5 was no slouch in that department, with a gorgeous, intuitive interface, offline playback, full-text search, and dynamic playlists, but even if you’ve been a fan since version 1, there are plenty of worthy replacements in the App Store. Like Twitter clients or weather apps, podcatchers all pretty much do the same thing–organize and play your favorite shows–so the user experience sets the tone. Over the course of its lengthy version history, it from paid to free with in-app-purchases and even offered two levels of subscription memberships, but modern clients kept the pressure on until the company announced earlier this week that it had run out of money and was shutting down for good.Ĭonsequently, Instacast leaves loads of good options in its wake. But with the podcast app’s popularity came a catch–along with a hoard of new users, a slew of competing players popped up too, all vying to chip away at Instacast’s sizable audience. One of the first podcast clients on the iPhone, the pioneering player helped propel the medium from its humble roots into a global phenomenon spanning the gamut of genres and subjects.
I have no experience with the other mobile OSes, so I can’t say what they do, but Apple scores the lowest of those three in my book.In some ways, Instacast doomed itself.
Microsoft also offers the ability to subscribe to podcasts from the phone (though, as I said before, the PC software isn’t aware of those subscriptions).
So if you don’t consider that “native support”, I guess that’s fine, since it’s not part of the core that has to be present to say something is an Android device, but it is a solution that is made available pretty trivially and for free by the maker of the OS. It is only “marginally” better because it’s fucking terrible. It is better in that it allows you to do everything on the phone. There is a free Google-made app called “Listen” that has been pre-installed on 4 of the 5 android devices I’ve owned. Well, there’s native and then there’s native. I mean, I have to charge my phone every day anyway, right? I don’t listen to a hell of a lot of podcasts so it’s not a major inconvenience for me that they only get auto-updated when I sync with iTunes (especially now with wi-fi syncing).
And to be fair, if you go into your podcasts on an iOS device, there is a button you can press that takes you to the iTunes page for that podcast, where you can download new episodes manually.
I’ve often wondered why they’ve never added it as well, but I can sort of understand IOS not polling for (and downloading) new podcast episodes given Apple’s policy of not doing things that would compromise battery life*. What do you mean when you say that it doesn’t know about your list? The device doesn’t even seem to know about my subscription list.
Is there any way to update my subscribed podcasts on the iPod touch (or iPhone I suppose) without syncing to iTunes on my PC? I realise I can search for and download individual podcasts but that’s rather inconvenient.