Chris​Hubbs​.com

I’m an avid podcast listener on the iOS platform. For the last umpteen years I’ve defaulted to using Marco Arment’s Overcast app.

I listen to podcasts in spurts. I’ll subscribe to an old one (I’m looking at you, The History of Rome), listen to a hundred episodes, slowly burn out, and then listen to an occasional one in the backlog. There are very few that I listen to religiously on an every week basis. I also have several podcast subscriptions where I sort of pick through the episodes, find some I want to listen to, and discard the rest. Overcast has worked fine for this, though I do need to remember to go in and weed out episodes in that last category often enough to not auto-delete episodes I really want to listen to.

I’m a Marco fan. I’ve listened to his podcasts since back before ATP was a thing. I have been a Day 1 purchaser of his podcast app, his very short lived adblocker app, and was a big Instapaper fan back in the day. So Overcast was a no-brainer. And on the whole it’s worked well for me for years now. I like the Smart Speed audio processing quite a lot.

But then this summer I started running in earnest again, and wanted to be able to put podcast episodes on my Apple Watch so I could listen to them while running without having to carry my phone. And it turns out that Overcast’s sync to watch functionality is pretty limited, and the features that do exist don’t actually work very consistently. So I’ve been juggling between Overcast and Outcast, an app that exists exclusively to push podcast episodes to the Apple Watch. Which is clunky when I want to start listening to a podcast while running and then finish it in the car (I’m looking at you, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Episode 323, a 3.5-hour long discussion with Jacob Barandes on Indivisible Stochastic Quantum Mechanics) and I have to check where I’m at on my watch, open Overcast, and drag the slider forward to that timestamp.

This morning somebody on my micro.blog feed mentioned that they had picked up Castro and found it pretty useful, and that it had a podcast Inbox function where you could sort through new episodes and decide which ones you wanted to enqueue and which ones you wanted to ignore. That Inbox function made me curious. I had downloaded Castro back years ago when it was initially released back in 2013, played with it for a few days, decided it wasn’t competition for Overcast, and never gave it another thought. But today I downloaded it again and decided to give it another look.

And here’s my first reaction: Castro is actually really good. It stepped me through importing my subscriptions from Overcast, grabbed them all, gave me an inbox to sort through, and was ready to start playing. It has nice iOS widgets, has a watch sync that appears to actually work, and, maybe most surprisingly, the Apple CarPlay app responsiveness seems far better than Overcast’s.

I’ve got a week of free trial before Castro wants me to pay for a yearly subscription, and I’m gonna give it a go for that week. I’m sure it has some foibles of its own, but it might just be a welcome change from a long-time app that’s gotten kind of stale.