Indie podcast apps seem to be having a moment… but not the kind anyone wants to have.

I’ve been a longtime user of Overcast on iOS. My love for this app runs deep. It was a pretty big decision point for me making my way back to iOS years ago. Last year it went through some pretty massive code changes that caused no shortage of headaches. I stuck with the app as bugs were being squashed and then… silence. The updates stopped and game breaking bugs persisted. Bugs like… episodes stopping mid playback and then being deleted. Not good.

I did a little research and decided to give Castro a try. Castro is such an amazing looking app! Simple and usable, with a lot of options for customization. Bonus, its sub price is cheaper than most podcast apps too! The one issue it has made it a no go (for now) and that is, it’s watch app loses sync with the phone. A bit of background for me, I take daily walks with just my watch and listen to podcasts while I go. Having a functional watch app is a must have feature to me. To Castro’s credit, the developer is incredibly responsive. We exchanged several emails while trouble shooting the problem. Sadly the issue seems to be pretty deep in the code and the developer is planning a rewrite of the watch app, so I’m mostly out of luck there.

While I spent some time in the podcast wilderness, development had picked back up on Overcast! Lots of bugs have been squashed along with a rewrite of the watch app… Yay! (uh oh). Sadly the rewrite has totally broken the watch app as best I can tell. After spending some time waiting on the rest of the bug fixes to come (they didn’t) and even experimenting with the test flight that was squashing watch bugs (my issues remain) I decided to look into other avenues.

And as I start diving into reviews of various podcast apps it seems that the indie scene is having a pretty rough go. And so… for the first time in more than a decade I’m giving Apple Podcast a serious look.

Apple podcasts is weird. Its playlist.. err.. station system takes some getting used to. Additional the focus on discovery is of no use to me. But it’s easy enough to make a playl… stations.. of new episodes and the watch app is actually quite nice. So here I am!

I really hope that Overcast (or Castro) can get their bugs squashed, the indie scene is a my favorite place to be.