Fountain: Podcast Player 12+

Love what it stands for

Shame the app is still somewhat buggy in plenty of places, the odd crash/freeze here, the odd feature or two not working over there.
UI is not very intuitive and feels a bit all over the place…

However don’t let that put you off, hopefully a few polished updates this year will get this there.
Overall love what this stands for and giving you the ability to interact with the show so much easier.

Clunky

I was excited to try a new podcast app and this fitted the bill from the description.

However it’s not for me. Importing podcasts from another podcast app did not work, this was a tedious task to search and add all of the podcasts I follow manually.

It doesn’t download new episodes in the way I expected. When I opened the app nothing downloads. I checked back in another podcast app and new episodes appeared immediately. There’s no “refresh” like other apps.

I changed my settings to only download only over Wi-Fi, but after my internet was turned off for the night, I happened to check my Lock Screen and saw two new episodes of a podcast that were then downloading when I opened the app.

You can’t skip first or last like other podcast apps either.

You also can’t mark as played episodes, when you look at a podcast all episodes show regardless of what you may or may not have listened too.

I’m sticking with PocketCasts but may check Fountain again in the future to see of there have been any updates.

Strange layout with queue and episodes, surely this is the same thing? Couldn’t create playlists without premium.

Developer Response ,

Hey Tammie - thanks for your constructive feedback.

We have just tested the import function again on the latest version (0.7.9) and everything is working correctly. Sorry it wasn't working for you!

If you have auto-download turned on, new episodes from shows you follow will be downloaded as long as you have a connection and have the app open in the foreground (we will add background downloads very soon!).

When you open the app, new episodes from shows you follow will automatically be fetched. Since your feedback, we changed the logic here to ensure this happens 100% of the time as in some cases new episodes were slow to appear in the app. You can pull down on your library to manually fetch new episodes too!

Regarding skip first / last, are you referring to skipping intros and outros? We can certainly add support for this feature.

We recently introduced mark episode as played and this is now live in the latest version.

Regarding layout and general UX, we will be making some major improvements here in the next couple of months. If you have any specific needs or suggestions, please email us at hello@fountain.fm and we will definitely take them into consideration.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and we hope we see you back on Fountain soon!

Great Potential

The idea to earn sats for listening to podcasts sounds perfect. Unfortunately, there’s no rhyme or reason to when you’ll gain sats or absolutely zero. It’s a new app, so some bugs are to be expected.

It’s good that you can tell broadcasters about the app and encourage them to link to Fountain. This enables listeners to send sats back to their favourite show.

One area of real concern is how hot the iPhone becomes while using the app. What is it doing to my processor? Why is it working so hard? When people have approached the company about this on social media, no answers have been forthcoming.

Developer Response ,

Hey Kinswah - sorry to leave you hanging. We've been working hard to address all of the issues that users have been reporting over the last few weeks and we hope you will find that the app is now significantly improved compared to last year. Earnings are more reliable and the overheating issue is under control. We hope you will consider giving Fountain another go.