thoughts on the best podcast app and why?

After being through Overcast, a trip into Pocketcast and Google/Youtube podcast, a year on Spotify, I’ve come back to the apple podcast app.
All of them have their limitations and features I like, but the podcast app just work.
It have lost the ability to export .opml-files, but I hope I don’t need to do that in a while.

I ditched Castro a year or two back as its interface had taken a turn for the worse! However, after reluctantly using Overcast and the Apple app in the interim I went back to Castro when things improved again. For me, I have two major requirements of a podcast app; (1) it must support chapters and (2) it must show the number of unlistened episodes against each show name. Castro does this amongst other aspects I like and, unlike Overcast, performance is not affected by VoiceOver.

There are monthly and annual subscriptions.

I love this app & it's cross-platform.
It even works with Alexa. It does not have an Apple TV app, but it does support airplay so you could use it on the Apple TV that way.
They do have a Mac app, but it must be downloaded from their website, as it’s not in the Mac AppStore.
Any questions, just post them here & I'd be more than happy to assist you.

I've been using Downcast for many years now on my iPhone and think it is a really great app.

You can easily find and subscribe to podcasts, show only the podcasts with episodes currently in them or not and hide the rest if you like, each podcast shows how many episodes you have downloaded or have set to stream and how many have been listened to or partially listened to, etc.

In addition, each podcast is highly configurable in terms of episodes to keep or not, how many to keep, how much to skip at the beginning or end if you like, etc. Although you can specify many settings for each podcast, there is also a "global setting" that will be set for all podcasts and only overwritten for individual podcasts where you've chosen to select another setting.

Downcast also supports navigating to chapters if the podcast supports that, supports the creation of pplaylists, and much more.

Very accessible and easy to use. I have never had a problem with it.

--Pete

Greetings. I have recently migrated my podcast listening from Downcast to Spotify. There were a lot of things I liked and enjoyed about Downcast, such as the choice of keeping anywhere from a few to all podcasts, creating my own podcast feeds from audio I had downloaded and saved to iCloud, and more. Downcast is on iOS and the Mac. It may be on Apple TV too, not totally sure on that.
Though i accumulated a massive collection of podcasts from Downcast, most of which grew over time and thus I couldn't keep up with them all, I recently made the switch to Spotify. Since then, I have found several benefits of Spotify over Downcast. Other apps may do similar things, and perhaps these are not new. They are new for me. First, you can listen to each podcast separately. Or, you can go to a list which has everything you're subscribed to, along with a few podcast recommendations. I think Castro does something similar, but Castro cost more than I thought of as a fair price: To be fair, Downcast and Spotify also cost money, but their charges seemed more reasonable to me:
Anyway, Spotify also will send new episode push notifications. I think Downcast also does this, but I was subscribed to so many podcasts from Downcast, I didn't want those notices taking over my iOS life: Finally, Spotify is already on a number of different platforms. It would not surprise me at all to learn that there was an Apple TV Spotify app. You can look elsewhere on AppleVis for infor'mation about Spotify. I will say they have competitive pricing and seem to be more universal than Apple Music. Happy hunting.

It's not on a mac, but it's very easy to use, and is free. It's quite new so doesn't have continuous play yet, and I don't need chapters yet so I'm not to bothered about that but I believe it exists if there are chapters in the podcast.

The thing is, you're going to get tonnes of different answers for this question, I like anytime, I'll be looking at poketcast to see what it offers over anytime, but this app is simple to use and does what I personally need it to do.

I get the impression that there are 2 types of podcast listener. Those like me just want to find an episode to play and then listen to it, and that's it. And then there are those that like to create and manage playlists and queue up lots of things to listen to. That is definitely not me.

So I use Apple Podcasts on the iPhone. It is pretty simple and does what I want. I bought Downcast but didn't get on with it. I sometimes use Overcast and it's fine. The one thing I like about overcast is that I can have a different playback speed setup for each show. So I tend to use it for shows where I want it a little slower and use Apple Podcasts for everything else.

I cannot make any sense at all of Apple Podcasts on the Mac. I'm sure it is accessible but I've never been able to work my way around it.

The only other app I sometimes use is Amazon Music. It is a horrible app but just about usable. The only reason I go anywhere near it is because a couple of podcasts are ad free on Amazon Prime. I'm not sure how else I would listen to them.