Apple Podcasts Ratings and Reviews

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!

[if you see this and agree it’s a terrible app, press and hold (the otherwise invisible button pops up) the critical reviews to mark them “helpful” so it’s isn’t just the 5 stars that get visibility]

The Apple Podcast interface was always extremely frustrating, but recent updates have made it worse. Listen Now just queues things up without enabling users to fully customize the order things are played. To see all the episodes in a show, you now have to click multiple buttons. When I’m listening to an episode and click the show title (not episode title), it takes me to the episode page instead of the show anyway. “Library” ought to be a simple list of podcasts you saved, but it also autoplays or arranges shows according to its own algorithm that we cannot fully choose. Sometimes I want to listed to many episodes of one show back to back. Sometimes I do not. It’s weirdly inconsistent about playing all episodes of one show or all new episodes of every show depending how you hit play. Also, you should be able to save shows to your library without “following” them. I want to save the titles of shows without queuing up every new episode. Sometimes I want to retain a show title that I periodically click on in specific circumstances. I hate this app, but at least there is a way to leave reviews and feedback now (did not used to be possible—that’s how long I’ve been frustrated with this stupid app)

I’ve used this legacy Apple Podcast app for at least 3 or 4yrs now. Many of the apps that come preloaded on Apple devices are basic without a lot of customizable features but still are intuitive and function well. This app however seems to have lost usability and features seem to have diminished rather than gotten better over time.
I do like the vast number of pods available in the platform and many seem to have fewer commercials than when I use them on other platforms. I also like the basic usability in that you can initially figure out how to use it without referring to instructions- or used to. Also keeping up with my library across devices is great.
BUT sometime over the past 6 months or so it seems like some of the default features have changed. The main problem I have is when an episode has finished it now seems to auto play the next PREVIOUS episode, even if it has already been played and clearly shows as ‘played’. I swear it used to go to the next UNPLAYED episode or just stop if you were up to date. Having an old episode auto play is super frustrating when you’re driving or perhaps cooking with messy hands so that you can’t just stop what you’re doing and manually select a new episode.

I generally like this app, but recently - I like it less, due to some unexpected playback behavior. I made a smart playlist including several different podcasts that have unplayed episodes published within the last week. I select the first episode on this playlist to start playing it and it seems to work ok, but if the app is ever interrupted for any reason and I resume podcast playback, it will start to play whatever partially played episode it was playing last (which is good), but instead of playing the next episode on the smart playlist, it goes to the next unplayed episode of only that one podcast, forgetting the smart playlist I made and playing episodes that are many months old. Because I often am playing the podcasts app while driving, I notice it and am irritated by the lack of variety and when I stop and park the car, I find myself manually adding episodes to “up next” and having to be more ‘hands on’ than I would like to be.

The shorter summary is that smart playlists need to get a little smarter.

I also have been requesting a new feature to allow me to sort a playlist by episode duration. I prefer to listen to my shorter 5-10 minute podcast episodes first and the 45 minute or the hour long podcast episodes last.

I used to use this app every single day to listen to hours of my backlog of my favorite podcasts, then Apple suddenly switched directions and completely removed the ability for users to load and store old episodes of podcasts and manage them as they like. I spent countless hours trying to find a hidden feature to do what used to simply be the natural function of the app, when it was built into iTunes, but to no avail. My huge library of podcast content was simply lost to me. It was first scrambled by the broken Podcast app for macOS, so I could no longer access the files directly, then this app failed to support playback of the files I did have.

Archives of older episodes are often very difficult to come by, as many providers truncate the older files, or creators switch services and don’t bring their older episodes over to the new service. My years-old collection was lost. I ended up scouring the Internet to gather up as many of the raw MP3 files as I could find, and am awaiting someone to give me a way to organize and listen to them. Finally, recently, I discovered that iMazing may be a solution to load podcasts directly into this app manually, but my first attempt got some into my library, then they disappeared after I synced my phone again.

I just don’t understand they need to remove a core functionality from one of their apps that is used by so many people. :(

Another update: three times this week. Three times the setting changed on its own.

I’m back. It happened again. Less than a week. — I am so annoyed by this, I’m coming back to update my review after having to change this setting AGAIN. I turn off the continuous playback setting on this app at least once per week. Some weeks, it’s every day. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why it keeps turning on. A quick Google search reveals that this is a known issue that many people have complained about. I’ve tried going on to each of my apple devices to make sure the setting is off, and the next day, it will turn back on. Why does this setting keep changing? It didn’t even used to be the default. I do not like waking up in the middle of the night to find that my podcast app has played five episodes of a show I wanted to listen to when I’m AWAKE. FIX THIS ISSUE. ITS BEEN YEARS. Updated my review to take away another star as the continuous playback function has turned itself AGAIN. I can’t go longer than a week without it changing on its own. There are so many posts on Apple Support and Reddit about this very issue. PLEASE FIX IT. I used this app for years without this being an issue. Why has it been an issue for the last two years? It’s seriously so annoying and it’s messing with my ability to keep up on my favorite podcasts.

I’m half way through the Vallow update and to be honest, most podcasts I try to listen to, I’ve already turned it off by this point! Why you may ask? I’m not interested in listening to 20-25 minutes of the hosts talking about their lives. It’s fine that they do, but then they need to change the title of their podcasts for Pete’s sake (trying to keep it PG here). These girls get right into it. I’m a Paralegal and understand all the logistics but it’s so nice they explain what things mean to the listeners and they do it in a short amount of time. The detail is great. I’ve followed this case from the beginning and am hearing things here I had no idea about! Thank you! I have finally found a podcast that shares my level of legal inquisitiveness into this case! One that doesn’t test my patience level! The only other podcast I listen to right now is Nancy Grace and I’ve listened to her since the Casey Anthony ‘era.’ I gotta hear my “ BOMBSHELL TONIGHT” cracks me up. Even she goes on and on and on about her kids and hey, it’s okay to throw a blurb or two in, it’s going to happen, but I don’t need to hear a diatribe on every single show about them that takes up 10 minutes of the shows time! Lol I fast forward. Anyhow, thanks girls! You had me at hello!!

I have been a loyal Apple customer since buying an Apple IIe computer in 1982. I love Apple products. For the last 6 years I have been using this podcast app for 6-8 hours a day at work. I was taking 15 to 20 min to set up MY playlist. I would sometimes binge on a new podcast I found. Other times I would set up the order to match the types of work I was doing that day. Then Apple, you decided you knew best how and what I want to listen to. I updated my phone just before going to visit family so I just started listening again. It seems that the podcast app gets to set up my playlist-again! Didn’t you learn that people want to control the order they play their podcasts in after the last time you screwed it up? I am finding episodes I didn’t have listed suddenly pop up in the middle of my playlist or episodes I asked to play next go to the middle of the list. Podcasts that I haven’t listened to in months because I didn’t like them but hadn’t removed from my library are now interspersed in my play list. I can’t change the order either. I would have to remove them and try again I guess. What were you thinking? Doesn’t anyone that works on this app actually try to use it? I would hate to go to a new app as I have invested so much time in finding podcasts I love. Please Apple, just fix this already!

Maybe not a totally unbiased review as Josh interviewed me in one of the early episodes, but I can comment on this podcast from two perspectives. As a listener, I love this show. It amazes me the breadth of subjects for which Josh is able to secure guests. It’s incredible to hear first hand accounts of historically significant events. His interviewees provide unique “I was there” perspectives on truly amazing events, things that generations to come will read about in books and now have the opportunity to listen to first hand accounts of.

As an interviewee, I will tell you that Josh brings a level of professionalism and honest curiosity to these conversations. He does his homework, asks great questions, and knows when to get out of the way and let the subject of the interview be the story teller. He’s a talented guy.

I would highly recommend that you listen to 2 or 3 episodes, once you do…you’ll be hooked. You’ll devour the back catalog and wait anxiously for the next episode he releases. I know this is true because it’s exactly what happened with me. Well done Josh. I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do.