Apple Podcasts 12+

I don’t know where to begin but I have been listening and actually dancing with Sah and how I found this beautiful soul was not coincidence as I was going through my own grieving of loosing my mom. I’m just beyond grateful for these podcasts! Inspired and seen and heard that i can only say thank you for having the courage to come forward and BE that bridge for many of us. Today as I listened to this episode with Ash Canty and all her experiences as well as Sah’s experiences I was in tears of love, compassion, gratitude and kindness. I felt as if I was part of some of those experiences as well and wow it brought so much attention from the medial world as well and how little they know about the spiritual, and the body to the care of patients and the sickness is real and how ironic to say that in the health care system. I love you Sah thank you for making my morning even more aware of advocacy for mental health care and to know that even when we saw walking in this processes alone there’s humans like you willing to be a face to bring more awareness. Because without love and consciousness there’s no way to liberate and evolve as a humanity.
♾️✨🧘🏽‍♀️🤩🌈🙏🏽

I was a stitcher user until they shut down, so I’m new to Apple Podcasts. Since I started this I’ve found it technically better in format and playback and better for finding content. Now I’ve found so many cool shows that i have more content than I could ever listen to!
All good, but there are issues that REALLY annoy me, to the point where I took off 2 stars.
First off, the app should open with new episodes, which is what I mainly want to see.
On a slow day i can browse around and find something else.
Most of all though, are the technical shortcomings. I should say that there might be solutions to these somewhere in settings but the fact that I can’t find them are just as big of a problem. I hate auto play! I don’t want to hear the next thing on some list, i want to decide the next thing to listen to. At the very least I should be able to make my own auto play list but I mostly just want to turn auto play off. I also want to turn off auto download! I’d also much rather sift through new episodes and download what I want then have to “remove download” what I don’t want to listen to, while my phone is getting a data blast to the storage! There is other things I would like to be able to tinker with the settings of, too, but basically it comes down to much more customization control in settings. That would earn this app a full 5 stars!

While I generally find the app to be clear and easy to use, there are some critical bugs with downloads. For serial shows which have to be played in order, while the podcast creator can designate that as the intended play order, the Podcasts app doesn’t recognize it for downloads. There is no option to download the “next” set of episodes, but there is a bug with the strings. When you switch to, for example, “download 3 most recent” and then go back, the string on the outer menu is “download next 3 episodes”. You can go in and out of the menu and it will change back and forth between “next” and “most recent”. In any case, whichever you choose, it just downloads the most recent. I’m on episode 3 of a story podcast that is marked as needing to be listened to in order, and download “next/most recent 3” downloads episodes 11-13. There is simply no way to get it to download 3-5, or even just 3. This is frustrating enough that I’m deducting 2 stars. There is another flaw that has caused me to remove another star. You cannot mark a podcast series as “played up to this point”. If I’ve listened to a series on another app and am hundreds of episodes in, I can’t switch over to this app and mark those first 200 as already played. I have to do every episode manually, which is infuriating if I, again, want to listen to episodes in order.