Overcast

Still has the best features, including smart adaptive playback speed, and great podcast organisation options. After the last major update, there are still some minor annoyances. Particularly, in older versions, when viewing a podcast episode anywhere, the podcast title was clickable, taking you to the podcast page, where you could view all episodes, podcast settings, etc. Now, depending on exactly how you got to an episode page in the app, sometimes the podcast title is clickable, sometimes you can find a “Go to podcast” menu item, and sometimes you can’t get there at all! It’s maddening and so confusing. Just make it always clickable!

I am a long time fan of the app. But it’s become almost unusable these days. It happens pretty much all the time that when I start a podcast episode that hasn’t been downloaded before, at some point, it jumps to another episode of the same podcast that hasn’t been downloaded. Even when I go back it happens again and again. This never happened in years of using it until a few months ago. It has pretty much ruined the whole app for me, and now I look for the same podcasts on Spotify.

Overcast was once the best app but the recode didn‘t went well. The app often doesn‘t detect, when I use the slider to jump forward. Instead I move the tile. I can‘t skip any more, I have to use named slider, that is out of focus. Navigation is far worse than it used to be. Chronological queue has a bug so it‘s not chronological any more. 1.1 speed went missing but 1.25 is too fast for me. I went on using the app for months but I‘m already looking for alternatives because it goes on my nerves at least once a day. Sorry.

Overcast was my favorite go-to podcast app, until its recent anniversary update. First of all, the changes made with the update and the reasons for them were communicated very clearly by the developer, which I very much respect. Seemingly there were a lot of background changes and modernizations which the users can’t directly appreciate but which enable faster and more frequent iterations and app improvements. What I liked: - modernized UI, rounded buttons, better looks - the search function was merged with the podcast discovery, tying things together - new podcasts to discover are sorted by categories (though maybe this isn’t new, I’m not sure) - “add to playlist” shortcut within three dot menu - new episodes from all of your podcasts now are shown in a slider at the very top. This is really handy to me, since I follow a bunch of daily news podcasts and weekly or monthly podcasts, and I don’t always know at which time or day of the week they’re releasing new episodes. Makes it really easy to fetch a new one. What I (still) dislike: - Within the episode player, you used to swipe on the podcast’s cover photo between audio settings, episode description and chapters. You can’t swipe anymore. Chapters and audio settings now got their own little buttons, which make the UI underneath the picture seem more crowded than before and harder to use. To see the description, you now tap on the cover. This also reveals the menu bar to share, go to podcast, star, mark as listened and delete. I think it’s rather counterintuitive to hide the bar away like that and also to have it placed at the top, when the update originally was said to have usability on larger screens in mind. Also, to return back to the cover photo you have to tap X in the top right corner. Tapping doesn’t work this way round. Not very intuitive. - The new custom sleep timer. It used to be a little digital clock-like menu, where you could increase or decrease the timer with + and - buttons above and below each digit. To have a custom time set now, there circles of 60min, 10min and 1min in two rows titled “Add” and “Subtract”. Very cluttered, less intuitive than before. Feels like change for the sake of change, not really usability, to me. - The nice swiping up animation on the currently playing episode including haptic feedback is gone. Not functionally important, though I always found it nice. What got fixed since being broken by the update: - It’s possible to stream episodes again instead of being forced to download them. This change previously was made in order to ensure a better listening experience since dynamic advertising can skew chapters and timelines, though this delayed listening whenever your connection wasn’t great and/or an episode was several hours long. (I tried to download a 10h episode on 3G in Italy, that wasn’t very fun.) - Play Next, Play Last, Move to Top, Move to Bottom returned to the three dot menu on episodes (THANK YOU) In case this finds attention by the developer: I’d like to be able sort the podcast list “All” view alphabetically and the “Current” view by most recently published, if someday possible. Since the two most annoying things for me got fixed, I don’t feel the need to use another podcast app since I still value all of Overcast’s neat little audio adjustments, playlist functionality, per-podcast settings and notifications etc. The app does feel more modern now and I hope the UI receives some more love usability and intuition wise. Thank you for the effort of reading all this!

Marco, thank you for building something this thoughtful. Overcast has always been a cut above when it comes to audio quality and speed-adjusted playback — but the transcription feature takes it to a whole new level. For most podcasts, transcripts are delivered right out of the box. That's powered by Marco's own cluster of Mac Minis, built and maintained specifically for this purpose. And if a transcript isn't available yet? Just transcribe it on-device. The fallback is built right in. All of this, available to free users. That's not a given — it's a choice worth acknowledging. The UI is clean, considered, and stays out of your way. Every detail feels intentional. This is what indie software looks like when someone genuinely cares about the people using it. If you listen to podcasts, you owe it to yourself to use Overcast.

The app is really great. I switched from the Apple Podcasts app to Overcast due to issues with skipped episodes and other little things. I have been happy for a long time and still am. But there is one nasty annoying issue for some time now: Episodes are not autmagically downloaded to the Apple Watch when it is charging. The only way was downloading while playing the breakout game. Since switching to a new phone even that doesn’t work anymore: It always says “failed” :-(.