Playlists: breaking subscriptions or filters to sort episodes into lists.Ĭastro focuses on the Queue and Inbox, allowing more sophisticated triage and sorting.Queuing: setting up automatically and manually reordering which podcast plays next.Triage: dealing with incoming episodes.But I suspect most people reading this far in a podcast app feature comparison are drowning in episodes.Įach of these apps employs a unique approach to let you try to carve out the space you’ll listen to through a combination of triage, playlists, and queuing:

If you subscribe to just a handful of podcasts and have regular allotted time during a commute, runs, or work when you can keep caught up, this doesn’t affect you. Hundreds of hours of podcasts you haven’t listened to yet are likely to remain mostly unlistened-to ever. People speak of “podcast bankruptcy” in the same way they describe a pile of unread The New Yorker or The Economist magazines looming in the corner of their living room. Most people fare poorly when confronted with overchoice: too many options relative to the necessity at hand. The apps demonstrate a striking lack of similarity and make strong design and feature choices that differentiate them from one another.

However, none of the apps have tools to resolve duplicate subscriptions.īeyond these features, everything diverges. In each app’s settings, there’s an export option that allows you to share with any compatible software, which includes all the other podcast apps. These three apps all support OPML (Outline Process Markup Language), which for peculiar and atavistic reasons became established as the interchange format. You can export your podcast subscription list from one app to another.

Pocket casts carplay