Pocket Casts: A beautiful and well-designed app for listening to podcasts

I have been using Overcast for my podcast listening since its release in 2014. Even though I’m an avid podcast listener, I never gave another app a chance.

Pocket Casts has a beautiful design and a gorgeous overview of your podcasts. Your main podcast view shows a grid of cover art with a little badge in the corner for new episodes. You can choose between two different sizes of the grid or change to a list view. At the top, you have the ability to search. There is also an option for hiding the badge.

Tap on a podcast to see an overview and a description of the podcast. Beneath is a list of all episodes and if you tap you get more information about that episode. You can also access a menu where you can unsubscribe, download all episodes or mark them as played. There is also a setting for how Pocket Casts should handle this particular podcast. Here is the option to automatically download new episodes and/or add them to up next.

Discovery

If you want to find new podcast there is a great section called Discover. Here you can see what’s popular and trending now. They also collected the big networks and you can find top charts for each category.

Pocket Casts is built around the idea of subscribing to podcasts. It’s cumbersome to download or listen to a single episode of a podcast you aren’t subscribe to. When you tap on a podcast you only get the show’s description and the latest episode. The only way to see more information or previously released episodes is to subscribe.

Listening

When you’re playing a podcast there are three panels you can easily swipe between. The main screen is the Now Playing with cover art and the name of the episode. Beneath is a big play/pause button and buttons for skipping back or forward. At the bottom, there is a row of buttons. The first is for Playback Speed, Trim silence and Volume boost. Trim Silence skips silent parts and it saves a lot of time after a while. Volume boost makes the voices louder and easier to hear in noisy environments like on a bus or tram.

The other buttons are for sharing via AirPlay or ChromeCast and a sleep timer. In the left panel, you’ll find show notes and the share sheet. To the right is Up Next, a playlist for your upcoming shows. You can see how many episodes you have left and time remaining. Tap the edit button to reorder or delete.

Swiping down minimizes Now Playing and it becomes a mini player so you can continue to navigate in the app. Swipe the mini player to the left for a quick overview of your next episodes. This is also the easiest way to add episodes from a filter to up next.

Filter

If you subscribe to a lot of podcasts this is a really clever and fast way to manage your episodes. Filter out episodes based on one or more given criteria. It’s very similar to a playlist. Pocket Casts comes with some predefined filters for New releases, In Progress and Starred. If that’s not enough, you can create your own filters. Give the filter a name an icon and chose a color for the icon. There are 7 icons and 5 colors to choose from. Next step is to choose between unplayed, unfinished, and played. There are also options for downloaded/not downloaded and audio/video. Choose all of your podcasts or just a few and the time span since it was released.

Settings

There are a lot of settings and options in Pocket Casts divided into obvious sections . This makes it easy to navigate without feeling overwhelmed. My favorite part is the statistics. It gives you your total listening time with an interesting fact. Below that it lists the amount of time saved by skipping or by using Variable Speed and Trim Silence. In 2016, it’s mandatory to have a dark theme and Pocket Casts delivers with a beautiful dark theme that are my default option when using the app.

It’s easy to see how much space downloaded episodes take and you can delete all downloads with a single button. If you prefer streaming there is also an option to adjust the cache size.

There is also a an Import/Export OPML file, so I had no problem with moving my Overcast subscriptions to Pocket Casts. Both apps are very generous and allow exporting your subcriptions.

Synchronization and Other Platforms

Pocket Casts is a universal app with synchronization via their own server. The choice of their own server instead of using iCloud is because of compatibility reason. Pocket Casts is also available on Windows Mobile, Android and as a web interface for listening from your computer.

Conclusion

When I started listening to podcasts I subscribed to a lot of shows and never had time to listen to them all. Over the years, I did some cleaning and now I only listen to a handful of shows. The one issue I have with Pocket Casts is how difficult it is to listen to a single episode. This is much simpler with Overcast, but I prefer Pocket Casts beautiful design, functionality, and per-podcast control settings. For these reasons, Pocket Casts has become my default podcast listening app.

Pocket Casts — App Store ($3.99)