I love podcasts. There are so many great podcasts out there, and I really enjoy the length, as sometimes you’re not up for the mental engagement of listening to an audiobook while driving between errands and kid school drop-offs and pick-ups. I’ve been a huge fan of the Castro Podcast App (iOS), and a paying subscriber of their premium experience since 2017.

I love their mental model of individual podcast episodes coming into an Inbox, to get sorted, and then added to the beginning or end of your queue. I find most other podcast apps envision the user browsing and selecting a podcast to listen to each time they open the app, which isn’t my model. When I have a few minutes (and I’m not listening to a podcast), I would triage my podcast inbox, archiving many episodes, and then adding some to the top or bottom of my queue (similar to an Agile development backlog); and then I listen to the queue when I’m driving, washing dishes, etc. Other apps, such as Apple’s Podcast app do have the idea of an queue, but it’s often hidden behind several clicks, hard to find in the UI, and too easy to wipe if you click the wrong icon.

I’ve loved Castro’s UI/concept for many years, so I’ve put up with years of poor searching, often having to open Apple Podcast app, copy the podcast link, paste it into Castro, and then wait a few minutes for it to pull the data slowly out of Apple’s repository before I could view and queue up the podcasts. But in the last few days, their back-end database broke and then a former employee said the app is planning to be shut down in the next few months (hasn’t been confirmed yet), which is too much for me, sadly. Here’s a good write-up on some of that unfolding.

I found a great video (Best (and Worst) Podcast Apps for iPhone) by Stephen Robles, which was helpful as I started shopping around for my next app. I started tinkering with PocketCasts, and I’ve been impressed so far — I think this will be my new podcast home. Their queue approach isn’t quite as central as Castro, but it’s got nice icons/navigation, the desktop app (if you pay for the premium service) is nice, and searching is much better. They have a slick podcast subscription migration capability, so I could easily copy all my podcast subscriptions (but not my queue itself, which would have been amazing).