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Apple has ruined its podcasts app

slate.com

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Re: Apple has ruined its podcasts app

#3

Post by cheeze »

The new podcasts app is absolutely terrible. My girlfriend is a heavy listener and the list of podcasts she has available takes between 30-45 seconds if it loads at all. Releasing the new version of this app was absolutely a regression, and I'm shocked that it actually got past any form of QA at all.

My only guess here is that a team felt the need to ship a new shiny product, even if it wasn't close to feature parity with the old one and is pretty unusable for a normal workflow without becoming quickly frustrated.

I assume business metrics, promotions, and appeal to novelty got in the way of functionality and user experience. My girlfriend mentioned that she wanted to turn off automatic updates because she would have never updated this app to the new version, which is quite frustrating as somebody with some basic netsec knowledge.

Apple, what happened?

Re: Apple has ruined its podcasts app

#4

Post by banku_brougham »

I think everyone on HN knows this already. I was using Casts for a while, even paid something for it. However it was Ok but infuriating, if that makes sense.

So i downloaded the Apple podcast app again, not wanting to pay and assuming they are all equally horrible. Not true!

Where most software tries to make you addicted to the product, the Apple Podcasts app nobly repels your best efforts to engage. And they are right — walking to the coffee shop and listening to birds chirping and the sounds of the day beginning is a pmeasure no app can provide.

Re: Apple has ruined its podcasts app

#5

Post by josephxanderson »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #2

There's a reason it's the only app in the store that has its reviews and rating mysteriously hidden

To be fair, all iOS internal Apple apps that you can remove are like this in the app store. And although they appear to be decoupled from iOS completely, updates aren't pushed out through the App Store either.

Re: Apple has ruined its podcasts app

#7

Post by JoBrad »

cheeze wrote: post #3

The new podcasts app is absolutely terrible. My girlfriend is a heavy listener and the list of podcasts she has available takes between 30-45 seconds if it loads at all. Releasing the new version of this app was absolutely a regression, and I'm shocked that it actually got past any form of QA at all. My only guess here is that a team felt the need to ship a new shiny product, even if it wasn't close to feature parity…

It really is horribly slow now - and not just in the way that you describe. Previously, I could load the podcasts app, and tap the top item in the unplayed list, and it would begin playing the entire list. Now there isn't a way to do that. Instead that tap opens the list of podcasts for that show, and then I have to tap the podcast again to select it, and once again to play it. And it only plays podcasts for that show! As far as I can tell there isn't a way to play all of the unplayed episodes I am subscribed to.

I moved to Overcast.

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