Apple recently released Podcasts, a new iOS application for playing back podcasts. Before the release, podcast playback had been part of the iPod/Music and Video applications on iOS devices, or part of the iPod itself since 2005. This is apparently no longer the case in iOS 6, but Apple considers podcasting important enough to release this new standalone app.
The application is surprisingly immature, however. It crashed on me half a dozen times in just two days, performance is glacial, and there are numerous bugs. (And I'm not the only one who feels this way.) Most prominently, the app seems like the roach motel of podcasting: podcast episodes check in, but they don't check out.
But we have reason to hope that an update could turn this into a great app.
Podcasts is available though the App Store like any other application. But even though it can operate autonomously, it's not really a regular application: it hooks deep inside the media syncing part of iTunes on the computer. In this regard, it's very similar to iBooks—the app will work on its own on an iOS device just fine, but it syncs books and PDFs back to iTunes on the computer. Podcasts works in much the same way, by presenting podcast episodes downloaded on the computer. But Podcasts also supports auto-updating—with and without auto-downloading—on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. It also allows streaming podcast episodes rather than downloading them.
So far, so good. Immediately after downloading the app to my iPhone 4, I was even able to sync playback positions back and forth between Podcasts and iTunes on my Mac. But after that first hour, it never worked again. Now Podcasts and iTunes lead completely separate lives, except that each device sees the podcast episodes downloaded by the other. Playback positions or played/unplayed status are remembered by each separately.
Episodes really don't check out
After enabling auto-updating for a particular podcast, the Podcasts app downloads the feed in question and shows all the episodes that are currently in that feed. For the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, there are 363 of them dating back to 2005. (Side note: please, podcasters, curtail your feeds. Even though all these episodes don't show up in other podcasting apps, all the info is still transferred whenever an app checks for new episodes. It slows down the process and unnecessarily eats up bandwidth.)
Having to manually remove all those hundreds of episodes would be bad enough. But the reality is even worse: Podcasts doesn't let you manually remove titles of episodes. "Save that for downloading and playing the episode," I thought. But no, not even that will get an episode out of the list. Auto-deletion didn't work for me, so I had to delete episodes manually after listening to them. That does get rid of the downloaded file, but the episode listing itself reverts back to undownloaded status and remains in place. This is true even for podcast feeds that aren't automatically downloaded, but are only synced from the computer. So after a while, Podcasts' interface is littered with episodes that were consumed long ago.
To add insult to injury, episodes deleted in Podcasts are transferred back over from the computer upon the next sync due to the broken status syncing that occurs between Podcasts and iTunes. (In the Music app, you can safely delete an episode after playing it and it'll be marked "played" on the computer. As such, it's not synced back to the iOS device as long as your sync settings specify unplayed episodes only.) The trouble with all of this is that it doesn't look like a simple bug. Rather, it seems as if Apple hasn't spent the time to consider how deletion of old episodes should work.
Unnecessary features
Although the Podcasts interface marks a major departure from that of the Music app, a little button in the top right corner is still there. In Music, this button will show the tracks belonging to the same album for music, or the episodes in the same feed for podcasts. It also allows you to change the rating of a song or a podcast episode. In Podcasts, however, it's just a listing of the downloaded episodes. We already have this in the form of the "feed" view, which displays much more information and many more options. This makes the button somewhat superfluous.
It's also possible to make the application "sleep" after 5, 10, 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes, or when the current episode ends. Apparently a good number of people like these timed sleep options, but in reality, it has always been possible to do this by using the Clock application that's part of iOS. Clock has a timer, which can stop audio playback after a preset number of hours and minutes. (Discovery of this feature has been low, however. It's not made explicit that this works on all applications that play back audio.)
Personally, I don't care that much about the app's discovery functionality on the iPhone, but I imagine this has the potential to be a great asset for regular podcast consumers, and is a lot nicer on the iPad's bigger screen. What I do like is seeing Apple's trademark simplicity applied to the podcasting space. This is good for casual podcast consumers who may get lost in the complexity of some of the third-party podcatchers that are available. It's also an inspiration for the developers of those other apps to limit the extra options to what really provides a benefit to more discerning users. Podcasts is in a good position to be as simple as possible, because complex per-feed settings can always be applied in iTunes.
Because podcast functionality is now no longer part of iOS itself, Apple is free to fix bugs and add improvements more frequently than the few times per year when iOS updates are released. But as Instapaper developer Marco Arment points out in his podcast, Build and Analyze, not having podcast functionality present on iOS by default likely means that lots of people aren't going to discover podcasts organically like on older versions of iOS.
A long wishlist
Although it only shows up when you pull down the list of podcasts, there is an edit button that lets you remove unwanted podcast feeds (and their episodes with them). One of those edit buttons also needs to find its way to the list of episodes for an individual podcast. This would allow for quickly deleting downloaded podcasts, but also the titles of undownloaded episodes. If the user deletes a bit too enthusiastically, a "show all episodes" option could bring back the deleted titles if necessary.
A small but ongoing annoyance with podcast support on iOS is that Apple assumes that after listening to a deep discussion about economics for an hour, I immediately want to do it again. As such, it keeps playing episodes of a podcast one after another. No offense to the excellent host and guests of EconTalk, but usually after one of those episodes, I'm ready for some lighter fare (And no, marking the next episode as played is not what we need). That is not to say that it's always the right decision to stop playing at the end of an episode. Having to pick up the iPhone to select a new 5-minute podcast eight times during a 45-minute drive is not exactly convenient—or safe.
This is why we need playlist support. The good thing is that Podcasts already has that in the form of the Unplayed Episodes list. Give that an edit button as well so these episodes can be reordered, and perhaps the option to mark episodes as hidden to save them for later consumption. And this would work much better if new episodes were (optionally) added at the bottom rather than at the top.
It's great that Podcasts allows old-timers such as myself to switch episode listings from newest first to oldest first. But do we really need to make that choice for each individual feed? An app-wide setting would be simpler to use. A toggle similar to the no repeat/playlist repeat/single song repeat button for music could govern whether the next episode in a feed is played after the current episode, or playback stops instead. Or, Apple could go wild and make it toggle between play next/stop playing/play previous.
I can see how it can be useful to set how many episodes are kept before auto-deletion kicks in for each individual feed, but I think such functionality is best left to iTunes. Also, auto-deletion is a tricky feature to get right, and bugs here can be quite bad—liberal application of the KISS principle would apply here. Feeds only need settings that toggle subscription, auto-download, and auto-delete.
The app-wide settings could then just have two options for auto-deletion: immediately after an episode is finished playing, or through iTunes. A complementary setting would be "download 1/3/5/all new episodes," so it's easy to catch up on podcast without using up too much space on the device. Finally, an explicit "allow downloading podcasts over 3G yes/no" option would be welcome in this age of restrictive data limits.
iCloud
One feature is conspicuously missing from Podcasts: iCloud support. Interestingly, some third-party podcast applications do support iCloud syncing of playback positions between different devices. An important reason for me to sync podcasts with iTunes rather than managing them on my iPhone exclusively is that it's much easier to pick out the episodes I want to listen to on the computer with a big screen and a keyboard. I'm not sure that I really need the ability to listen to audio podcasts on the computer, though. As such, a tool that lets me use my Mac to manage podcasts on my iPhone—through iCloud or over the local network—would be quite useful.
But even if it just syncs with iTunes the traditional way, with some relatively small tweaks and a little more bug hunting, Apple could have a winner on its hands with Podcasts. In the meantime, there are also many good third-party podcast apps out there. Just the ability to skip 10 seconds back or 30 forward using the headphone button is more than worth $2 for one of those.
Further listening: An in-depth discussion of Podcasts is—appropriately—in the latest episode of the Macworld podcast.
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