Overcast 4+

Love the app, and all the functions. I love being able to auto skip the ads for the first 15 seconds and last 30 seconds of a podcast. However in the last update I lost one feature that I rely on to sleep. I don’t know how niche this is.

I’ve found that listening to old podcasts is a great way to drift off to sleep. I don’t have to worry about missing things, because I’ve heard it before, and it helps me focus instead of my mind whirling on a billion different topics as I am trying to sleep. When one podcast ends, I used to be able to just press play on my headphones to start the next one. Since the last major update, it will not. I now have to get my phone out and manually start the next one. I like listening to lots of shorter podcasts, so I’m doing this every 10 minutes and it just kills it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I used to be able to just start another short podcast without even opening my eyes, but now I need to roll over, look at a screen and start the next one. I can find a setting to automatically play the next one, but then it just plays through the whole playlist without ever stopping. I’ve tried using all sorts of different playlists and options, and I just can’t get it to play the next podcast when I press play on my headphones.

The mid-2024 Update made so many nice little improvements. It really shows a depth of care. Everything is very nicely done. My only complaint is the removal of streaming to start playing a show. I’m guessing I can overcome this 99% by setting my regular podcatss to all download proactively. Internet in other parts of the world (like Australia) isn’t always great, so this effect can be magnified eg waiting tens of seconds if not minutes before something new starts playing. (And phone storage size to download as many podcasts as I would want to pushes you up a storage tier for many). I get the tradeoffs in complexity and especially now there are dynamic length inserte ads (good discussion on ATP about this btw). So still not sure if this is worth addressing on the app side, or just noting and working around on the user side.

My favourite “nice touch” feature: if you have a sleep timer on, it expires, then you hit play again from the lock screen, it plays with the sleep timer again rather than infinitely. So it’s less work than unlocking the phone and setting up another timer. Great when you’re half asleep.