Let's take a tour of the new interface, shall we? Screenshots ahoy! The new app was stunning, bearing almost no resemblance to its former self at all. With iOS 7 and the release of Pocket Casts 4.0 though, the app's prior homeliness suddenly seemed like a distant memory. Needless to say, it didn't take long for me to switch right back to Instacast, the app I subsequently ended up sticking with for the next two years. Yeesh, I still don't understand what they were thinking back then. These kinds of apps tend to share very similar feature-sets, so there aren't many other ways for these apps to differentiate themselves.Īnd frankly, Pocket Casts 3 looked like it fell right out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. If a podcast app developer really wants to beat out the competition though, their best bet is to go above-and-beyond in terms of their app's design. I mean, it worked well enough as a podcast player I guess, but any old app can play audio files. Unfortunately, it hadn't lived up to the hype. I'd certainly heard good things about it from my internet friends, so why not? I remember this so specifically because I occasionally had some downtime at the hospital whenever he was asleep in the NICU, and it gave me a good chance to try something other than Instacast for a change.
The last time I can recall using Pocket Casts was on my old iPhone 3G, in the week following my son's birth. And so, I found myself doing something I never expected: I decided to give Pocket Casts another shot. Replacing an app on my dock is a pretty rare occurrence since I'm picky about what gets put there in the first place, but Instacast just hasn't been cutting it for me anymore. “The playback controls cover up some of the podcast artwork, the advanced toolbar can no longer be hidden, and the cloud sync service no longer seems to work properly.” 2 I talked about this a bit in my recent article about the state of podcast apps on iOS 7:
VEMEDIO INSTACAST UPDATE
But as it turns out, Instacast's recent 4.0 update sadly resulted in a step backwards in usability. If someone had told me a month ago that Pocket Casts was about to usurp Instacast's spot on my iOS dock, I would have looked at them like they were crazy.įor as long as I could remember, Instacast was the podcast app 1 that I felt provided the best overall experience on the App Store, and the one I recommended to everyone else who asked.
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