I’m currently looking for a replacement to castbox. Castbox us OK, but I want to learn what else good is out there. Bonus points for one that has movement-sensitive sleep timer the way Smart AudioBook Player has.
UPDATE: Testing out Antennapod. Looks nice, and seems to do what I want it to do. I need to experiment with the auto-download a bit and see if it behaves the way I want it to. If it does, we have a winner.
I migrated to antennapod after Google killed their podcast app.
Antenna pod has a few persistent and annoying bug/quirks.
- If you’re streaming it will often skip forward/backward in time by anywhere from 0.5 to 30-45 seconds when it downloads the next segment. I’ve seen this across a bunch of different podcasts. Conan needs a friend, stuff you should know, this American life, etc. There’s been quite a bit of activity on their forums about this, along with a few attempted fixes, but the problem persists for me
- I somehow wound up with 1+ GB of podcasts despite Auto delete turned on. This is potentially due to the prior bullet. I’ve had podcasts end early (on time) and also run 5 minutes past their end-timd
- The Android Auto interface is not great. The home screen pop-in, or whatever it’s called, will randomly show you 3 podcasts from something you’re subscribed to
I also find the interface somewhat odd.
You have an inbox, which is basically a running feed of new episodes from your subscriptions. You can play those directly, remove them from your feed, or add them to a queue. You can then do the exact same thing from the queue. I would either make the inbox dumber and keep the queue or flatten the queue and inbox.
The app is also massively customizable, which is cool, but some of the customizations interact with other things. Downloading from your inbox can add a podcast to your queue. Deleting from downloads, which is a fourth area of the app, can remove them from your queue.
I do generally like the app, and also like the idea of FOSS, but I suspect there are better commercial options out there.
The problem is that everyone seems to have a different workflow. I’ve used AntennaPod every day for years and I have a bunch of problems with it that are all different from yours! I’ve also got a couple of others fixed and features added by lobbying for them on the issue tracker BTW.
I suspect there are better commercial options out there
Not so sure, I’ve tried a bunch. Used Doggcatcher for years: not as advanced. Also PocketCasts for years at one point: this had better UX but when I tried it again recently I was underwhelmed and found it was missing things I wanted.
The main issue with the commercial clients is that they’re all desperately trying to become platforms, with obligatory sign-in and data harvesting. Typically by using cloud sync as the bait.
Google podcasts was a very low feature player, but it also just worked. Antennapod almost seems like it’s trying to be too many things to too many people. I’m not looking for anything fancy. Give me a list of episodes from my subscriptions and let me play them start to end without drama.
I wonder if the floor is falling out on podcasting. I’ve heard more than one host mention that ad revenue is down year over year by a decent margin :(
I’ve encountered the problem in your first bullet across multiple podcast apps. I think it might be more of a general Android issue instead of being specific to a single app.
That’s sad to hear. As I said in another comment here, I migrated when Google Podcasts was killed by Google. I never experienced any playback issues with it. What podcasts apps have you tried? I wonder if they all use a common library.
