Podcasts by Apple app review

Ian Douglas finds Apple's own podcasts app sorely lacking.

Apple podcast app
The reel-to-reel tape effect in Apple's podcast app

Podcasts are the great unfulfilled hope of online audio and video. Simply and silently, your favourite programmes will download themselves to your computer to be watched there or synced to your mobile viewer for watching later.

It’s a great idea, but has been rather overtaken by streaming audio and video, especially for the big broadcasters. Adverts are difficult to track when they’re embedded in a downloaded file and experiments with paid-for content have not really taken off in a significant way.

The greatest moment of expectation for the new medium was their inclusion in iTunes for Mac and PC, removing the need for a separate downloader and player. Now, as iTunes creaks and crashes under the increasing level of bloat that Apple are crowding onto it, iOS is splitting different forms of media up so they can be played using different apps.

Books and video have had their own apps for a long time but now, with the launch of Apple’s own podcast app - a standalone centre for finding, downloading, storing and playing downloadable and streaming episodic content - there is a split between two types of audio.

Apple appears to be trying to persuade its customers to store their music in the cloud, paying for the company’s online storage, rather than locally on their devices. iPods are getting smaller and the PR talk is of iCloud, not capacity. So keen podcast listeners might have been forgiven for thinking that this app is a shift from iTunes-based downloading and syncing to a cloud-based approach where new episodes would seek them out and appear wherever they are, filling their pockets with new programmes even more easily than before.

Well, yes. And no. More no than yes.

It starts well, transferring your subscriptions from the music player to the podcasts app automatically, and downloading the latest episodes without pausing to ask. Unfortunately the default view is a tiled affair with a large picture for each podcast, so only four are visible at any one time. Switching to the list view (which allows you to see the total number of episodes as well as the tile view’s unplayed number) is simple enough but results in a pause so long I was convinced that the app had crashed. No scrolling was possible, nothing could be selected, the whole phone froze for more than five seconds. This happened every time I started the app.

Tapping through to a podcast once the pause is over reveals a small picture, a couple of lines of description then one line of title per episode followed by an ellipsis if the title is too long. The title is almost always too long.

Episodes are played latest first by default, so unless you go into the settings and reverse the order you’ll end up listening to series in reverse. You’ll have to go to the settings anyway to coax the app into downloading new episodes automatically rather than waiting for you to refresh them, and as often as not you’ll find that you have a title and a link to download it from iCloud rather than an actual sound file, which is great if you have wifi or 3G for streaming but no good at all in large sections of the countryside or on the tube.

It loses track of which episode have been played and which haven’t, so you never really know if you have something new to listen to, it crashes frequently and the ‘Top stations’ discovery mechanism is so in love with its graphic-led interface it doesn’t bother letting you know what the podcasts are about.

A common (usually unjustified) criticism of Apple is that they focus too much on the look of their products at the expense of quality engineering. This app, with its smooth animation of reel-to-reel tape and wonderfully realised translucent sliding cover working perfectly as the sound in the background judders, splutters and stops, is almost a parody of the company’s priorities. The development mockups might have been beautiful but it just doesn’t work.