My most favorite of Podcasts’ features is its Top Stations tab. There’s a lot of fun stuff to be found behind that sound icon door. Top Stations is Apple’s way of helping you discover new podcasts. Obviously they’re not tailored to just you though; as the name implies, every popular podcast from every category is in here. Browsing them can be more fun than going to the store, too. You can drag your finger left and right at the top to scroll through the items quickly, or just go through them one by one swiping left to right over the artwork. Once you’ve found something to your liking, tap it to start listening.
Browsing the Catalog Mercifully, Apple has brought along its redesigned content stores with iOS 6, so that means the user interface isn’t nearly as bad as it was a few months ago. Before now, everything in Podcasts looked great, but downloading new episodes and shows would annoy users because the design changed drastically in the app’s integrated store. iOS 6’s new designs balance things nicely and you will no longer be surprised to see something so different when searching for something new to add to your collection.
There are four basic tabs in the iTunes podcasts store: Featured, Audio, Video and Charts. When you open the store up by tapping Catalog in the bottom left corner, you’ll be granted access to all these things and more. Finally, the user interface is dark just like the app itself, so no clashing occurs. On the Featured screen, there’s also a nice cover flow of the most interesting podcasts, along with whatever else is trending below. Everything else in the store is as you’d expect with no significant changes.
iCloud Sync Could Be Better Apple wants you to keep all your podcast subscriptions up-to-date using its cloud system, iCloud. Unfortunately, that’s all it does. You can sync your subscriptions and such, but there’s no playback sync. I’ve been wanting this for months now and Apple still doesn’t understand how important it can be to the end user. iCloud could be used to sync playback of your favorite podcast, film or TV show on all your devices, including your computer. So far, there’s no advance on this front.
The Problems That Don’t Exist Many users have taken to the App Store to slate Apple’s Podcasts app for its lack of multitasking, stopping every ten to twenty seconds, being hard to seek, etc., all of which I have not experienced. To say that I haven’t tried to find these features would be completely incorrect. I’ve searched extensively, testing every practical environment that one would use this app in, and have not found one of these issues to ring true. Now that could be related to the device as I’ve used a new iPad and iPhone 4S for my testing, but I still see no reason why playback should stop in an iPhone 4 or even 3GS.
While I’m on the topic of issues, however, I’d like to mention one thing I have noticed about Podcasts that’s not mentioned in any user reviews. Most people just listen to a podcast and pay no mind to the artwork, but I think it’s there for a reason. In this app, all the artwork looks terrible on a Retina display, specifically that of a new iPad. There are some podcasts that have higher resolution images than others, but most of the time it’s all rubbish. Pixelation is all around, along with distortion, which comes with JPEG compression.
This isn’t a problem with the app itself, but rather with Apple’s system. Podcasters are not required to submit a certain size of image, so they just upload whatever they happen to have. Sadly, nothing they have is good enough, it seems. Apple needs to start requiring higher resolution images for all artwork, not just podcasts. This has been a problem ever since the release of the new iPad earlier this year and sadly, Apple has still done nothing about it.
Other than that, general performance has been fine. Rotating the device causes no lag anywhere in the app and even the spinning wheels don’t slow things down. Many on the App Store mentioned performance issues, but I was unable to find anything of the sort, even in version 1.1 of the app. (Version 1.1.1 released while I was in the middle of writing this review.)
Separating Podcasts From Music was Unwise, But This App is Solid I don’t understand why Apple thought it was best to remove the podcasts function from the Music app in iOS 6. People never complained about it and a standalone app was not something users asked for, so why break up the happy couple? Worst of all, Podcasts is an optional download, meaning that setting off on your road trip without first installing it would be a mistake. Apple didn’t simplify anything by forcing listeners to resort to an optional app.
As for Podcasts itself, there’s nothing wrong with it and I’ve found the experience to be superb. The only complaint I could think of was iCloud sync for playback since I don’t use playlists all that often. Other than that, I see no reason why people should denounce this app as they have. It may have had problems in the initial release — and quite a few at that — but right now there’s nothing better for the job. If users take issue with the current release, I’m sure Apple will be sure to fix whatever bugs exist. It’s a growing product, just like Maps.
How do you like Podcasts? Is it worthy of replacing the function within Music or do you disapprove?