Podcast Apps

Frankly it feels almost unfair to even bring up Podcast applications and suggest improvements to them. Podcasts have been notoriously difficult to navigate for years, regardless of the application you use.

I assume most of the people reading this are either using an iPhone or own one – a safe bet considering ~47% of smartphone users in the United States have one [Statista] – which luckily means you do not have to go far to see what I am talking about.

Apple Podcasts

Apple made some headlines in 2021 with their iOS 14.5 update that promised to overhaul the Podcasts app. Unfortunately, those headlines were largely the result of a series of bugs that they introduced with this upgrade – the most prominent being that already played episodes were now marked as unplayed within the UI. With no ability to bulk edit (think multi-check that you’ve seen in the Photos or Messages apps), users had to go through their entire list for every show to mark individual episodes as Played. To put this into perspective, Rocketship.fm now has 13 seasons of episodes and it took me ~125min to mark the episodes I’ve already watched. Between checking if the episode was familiar and dealing with the UI adjusting to each checked episode I burned over two (admittedly distracted) hours cleaning up my podcasts.

Speaking of seasons, there is no breakdown of a podcast based on content. Seasons blend into one another into a sea of episodes that make it impossible to fish out whatever episode you were thinking of. This is hindered even further by the fact that there’s no search functionality within a given show page. If you want to find anything by search you have to jump to the Search tab and journey across all shows on the platform (no faceting for show title nor category) to try and find what you’re looking for.

Podcast applications are horrible – seemingly by design – and Apple’s solution may very well be one of the worst.