Not the parent commenter, but there's a lot of features I like out of Pocket Casts that Spotify doesn't do as well.
- Queuing/auto-queuing to a next-up playlist (with features like add to start or add to end)
- Faster playback (e.g. listening at 2x speed)
- Alerts when new episodes drop to a given feed
It's very configurable and works well.
Also, I just dislike having to abandon my music queue when I listen to a podcast on Spotify. It's nice to have music playing at home, pause it, go for a walk listening to a podcast, finish the walk, then resume the same song/playlist at home.
Favoriting episodes, bookmarks, auto-queues, prioritizing podcasts, downloading episodes for archival purposes, playback history, list of all episodes in progress, stripping empty audio, crazy amount of configurability, and an interface that isn't terrible. I'm sure there are a bunch of other features I'm forgetting.
I've tried Spotify. It's not a podcast player. It's an audio player with none of the conveniences of a modern podcast player. If all you want to do is listen to podcasts, I'm sure it's fine, but it's not in any way sufficient for my needs. At this point, Podcast Addict is the only app out there that I can stand to use.
Some apps also have the ability to compress silent gaps in audio which can save a lot of time over time. It may not work if you’re listening to things that need ‘comedic timing’ but otherwise it’s entirely seamless.
I’ve been using Apple’s app recently and its the one thing I quite miss.
Playback speed, how many episodes to download on each podcast (some I listen to often, some rarely), what do with them when done, when to go to the next episode automatically, there's a lot. And I want these configurable per-podcast.
I tweeted at the Pocketcasts team to recommend adding a feature that I would find useful (I think it was excluding "the" from alphabetised list of podcasts since it made titles clump together under "T"). They responded quickly and implemented it pretty soon afterwards. I was impressed.
I love the web player interface (although have found problems using a VPN) but the Android app has been a bit tricky to use, having to navigate to filters to find episodes I've downloaded.
Don't know about the competition, but PocketCasts has a lot of options in the share feature I use. Share podcast, share episode, share episode at this point. I'll often times send a share text saying "listen to the next 3 minutes".
Also configurable speed controls + skipping whitespace + easier to skip ads (Spotify podcasts break out the ads into their own streams so you can't skip them all in one go, though you can skip them individually).
You're not missing out on anything. The Pocket Casts UI is impenetrable and I can never remember how to tell which podcasts are downloaded, which I've listened to, etc. There's some overlap with the "archive" feature that is unintuitive.
Maybe I'm missing out on part of the experience. What else is there to do with a podcast other than download/stream and listen?
- Thanks for all the tips. I don't listen to a ton of podcasts but I'll give it a shot.