iCatcher! Podcast Player 9+

I came to the app store searching for a replacement for my old podcatcher. They decided to “upgrade” and get rid of many of the tools that allowed listeners to control the settings for individual podcasts...but I loved those tools and enjoyed having that level of control / customization.

This catcher caught my eye because it said I could make playlists and many pod catchers don’t allow you to easily do that, so I figured I would give it a try. Turns out this catcher was exactly what I was looking for! It’s true, you can adjust just about everything in this catcher, including somethings you didn’t know were adjustable. It’s fine for a novice or someone who doesn’t listen to a lot of podcasts, it’s easy enough to use and you can leave all the settings at their default so you can simply add podcasts and press play...BUT, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, want to make playlist with episodes from all different shows or are a control freak (jk, but not really) THIS IS FOR YOU!! If you’re here because your old podcatcher no longer does “XYZ” - get this! This catcher does the whole alphabet!

This app does one thing very well: it does not collect your user data. Other than that, I’ve been using this for months now and it is very frustrating to use. It has a million features, but half of them don’t work consistently, and the other half are often quite confusing to figure out. For one thing, often it will decide that it can’t play an episode that you were in the middle of that you were previously playing. It will give you some error and ask you to re-download or force quit or just dismiss the error. Sometimes I’ve gotten it to play the episode later by deleting it and manually re-adding it to a podcast list. Other times that just doesn’t work and I just can’t listen to that episode ever again no matter what I try. It doesn’t have a basic recently played list. It has supposedly that will auto fill, but this also doesn’t actually capture all of the episodes you may have recently played. It will randomly tell you that a podcast you were subscribe to isn’t available. This just scratches the surface. I really wanted to like it, because I believe it’s the only one that I found that doesn’t collect my user data. But it has a lot of problems, and the fact that I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes trying to get it somehow to play the episode I was in the middle of the other day, makes me want to delete it entirely. I think it’s time for me to search again for another player.

Two things drew me to this app: it’s a one-time purchase, and it doesn’t collect data about me. Everyone else wants a subscription. ICatcher is a full-featured podcast that does everything I want, like automatically check for new episodes and add them to my playlist, has a search feature to find and subscribe to new podcasts, has an in-app browser, everything you’d expect.

There are some minor irritations. Every once in a while, it redownloads old episodes I’ve already listened to, marks them unplayed, and adds them to my playlist. Also, I have a few podcasts that I’m catching up on and don’t want the newest episodes automatically added to my commuting playlist, and while it odd easy to exclude those podcast episodes from being automatically added to the playlist, I also can’t manually add episodes from the excluded podcasts. I’m pretty sure that’s a bug. I emailed the developer through the feedback option in the app, but I haven’t gotten a response.

As I said, I like the one-time purchase, but I also like the tip jar, and I plan to use it. I’m glad Apple copied that from Windows Phone’s App Store. It’s a great way to support developers without being forced into a subscription.