Alex’s Blog

Random musings on life, tech, and anything else

TL;DR - Apple Podcasts is awesome again

date: Tue Apr 28 21:52:05 CEST 2026

For years now I’ve spent hours and hours using Marco Arment’s Podcast Player. Years.

I’m switching back to Apple Podcasts.

The UX of Apple Podcasts has sucked for years. It’s hard to get right. It’s a small device. There’s a lot of content. There’s a lot to pack in a small area. But for the most part Overcast gets it right even though I’ve had some wierd UI glitches since the rewrite.

Overcast has one main advantage over Apple Podcasts:

Smart Speed. It’s really great. I can set it to something like 1.5x but effectively can get 2x speeds with no loss of fidelity.

It’s really, really good. And I can tell Marco put a ton of time into it.

You can’t beat “built-in”

Apple Podcasts is native. For all the good and bad that that entails. It just works. It’s built-in. Like the userland of FreeBSD it’s maintained by the same folks that write the kernel and other parts of the OS – there’s a holistic consistency that I really like.

Now don’t get me wrong. Had there not been upstarts doing really compelling things with podcasting there’d not be work happening in Apple Podcasts to make it better. Competition is still the best thing for companies and products. Had Spotify not moved into video podcasting or Youtube doing the same I don’t think Apple would have added the same to the Apple Podcast app.

And the UX for playlists is dumb. The Apple Podcast folks think you just channel-surf podcasts and episodes. I subscribe to feeds I love and listen to the episodes as soon as they drop.

That can be done with their concept of “stations” which I can only liken to an Overcast smart-playlist – I think. Anyway it serves as a servicable way to do playlists.

But that’s not the killer feature.

For the longest time I’ve wanted a way to quickly skip past the ads, I get that now with AI generated chapters

Currently Apple Podcasts AI generated chapters chunks – at least for the podcasts I listen to – chapters such that when one ends it includes the segment ending ad reads such that I can easily move to the next chapter and skip the ad!

You can do this same sort of thing in Overcast with the kareoke style transcripts but I have to search for it with chapters I can just switch to the next one.

I’m sure they’ll update it so that if podcasts ship their own chapters (or this must already exist idk) then this is moot, and also train the AI to not chunk around the ads … but until that happens (and I think there’s a chance that it will remain as is because Apple doesn’t care) Apple Podcasts is my new player of choice.

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