Castro Podcast Player App Reviews

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Accessibility is totally broken in the latest update!. THe latest update has totally crippled VOiceOver users from viewing the queue and inbox successfully. Most of the views display no information. Episode filter options are hit or miss as far as any ability to see the list of queued or inbox episodes! Accessibility was king before this change but now it appears that accessibility is at best an after thought by the developers! It seems that it is useless to report accessibility issues. The first issue I reported over two years ago having to do with the dismiss button on the playing screen has never been fixed. Now this latest update appears to create a lot of new options of which none are accessible.

Buggy with CarPlay. A nice app overall. UI beats Overcast every time, especially the inbox and queue functionality. It’s a really pleasant app to use and the look at, compared to Overcast, which I used for a long time and to me always felt homemade, rather than professionally developed, at least on the front end. I find The inbox is almost always current. I like the streaming of podcasts, which saves space on my phone. I often airplay to my HomePod, which works great, or Bluetooth to a device. My one complaint: it doesn’t always play nice with CarPlay. Sometimes the library won’t scroll past the first screen. Sometimes the app freezes on the screen on my car, but works fine using the phone. I’ll need to start a podcast from the phone and CarPlay takes a while to catch up, sometimes 8-10 minutes into a podcast. Sometimes both CarPlay and the phone freeze. I need to unplug and reply to get it going. Sometimes I need to force-quit Castro. Once in a while I need to actually restart my iPhone. Kinda annoying. I never had these issues with Overcast and CarPlay. I have these issues in both of my vehicles, an Audi and a Toyota, so I don’t think it’s the manufacturer’s CarPlay implementation, but I’m not a tech guy so who knows. It’d be great if the Castro folks could take a look at this bug. Thanks!

Superior feed but lacking versatility. This app is leaps and bounds ahead of every other podcast app out there when it comes to organizing your inbox and play queue. The big rub is versatility with multiple devices. You can play podcasts via the web by handing off to you Mac, but a real Mac app or web interface would be very helpful. It’s also lacking iPad or Apple TV apps. You can install the phone app on your iPad, but “syncing” is a game of backing up from one device and restoring from the other. Would love to see HomePod integration as well. This may sound like a bad review, but even with all of these shortcomings I still use Castro because it’s interface and organization is SO much better than any alternatives.

Incredible attention to detail! This app is a pleasure to use.. One example of the kind of awesome attention to detail: if you’ve gone deep into the menus searching or browsing, you can tap the search button in the bottom menu bar and each tap will take you “back” one level, finally taking you to the default “search” page. One more tap and it put the cursor into the search bar itself. This probably seems silly to read, and perhaps I explained it poorly, but in practice it’s exactly what you’d EXPECT the app to do in that context and it’s flawlessly executed. “Little” things like this abound and make it a very pleasant experience to manage and listen to podcasts. UPDATE: Castro on my iPhone SE, and original Apple Watch is zippy and fast. I appreciate that Supertop has apparently been thoughtful about keeping things humming on less popular, older hardware.

Best podcast listening experience with one large issue. I’ve used this app as my preferred podcast app for a few years now before becoming so frustrated with it that I switched back to Apple’s default. I’ve now moved back to Castro for the superior interface but the issue that drove me to ditch it the first time still persists. The app constantly drops audio output over AirPlay any time it is paused for more than a few seconds or the next podcast in the queue begins to play. This happens every time. I have to manually disconnect from the speaker and reconnect, and then it works again. I’ve reached out to support in the past and they had no fix and just told me it shouldn’t do that. No other app has this issue on my network, I’m using different routers than the first time, frankly there’s no way it’s my network that’s causing this. I wish this could be addressed as it greatly impacts my listening experience. Previously, I subscribed to the annual pass, but until this issue is fixed, I’ll stick with the free version. Any help on this is appreciated.

Love the Inbox; Queue can be slightly cumbersome. Very good podcast app overall, I especially appreciate the Inbox feature and the control it gives you over which episodes to actually download. However, a few changes would make the Queue (list of episodes you are ready to listen to) easier to manage (unless I’ve missed them): episodes not automatically moving to the top once you start them (I currently end up doing a ton of manual reordering to keep related episodes together because of this), being able to easily move multiple episodes at the same time, and being able to listen to just one episode and automatically stop at the end, even if there are more episodes in the Queue (I am often driving or otherwise engaged while using the app, and sometimes want to listen in bed but don’t for fear of falling asleep and wiping out my entire Queue).

Absolute love the app - feature suggestion. Best podcasting app I’ve ever used. Much better than Apple’s confusing app. I paid for the premium version so I could Sideload audio that I download externally. Works perfectly. One suggestion about side loads though: I wish I could edit the metadata of a side loaded audio file. At least just change the display name in the app or have to app update the display name when I change it in the iCloud folder. Because sometimes I download files directly into the Castro folder and they have strangely formatted names with underscores and I can’t change the name of the sideload in the app without removing the file and then adding it back. It would be even better if I could add custom artwork or descriptions to side loads but my main ask would be at least to be able to change the name. Great app! Thanks y’all.

Disappointed (no stand alone watch app). I love this app for so many reasons, the foremost being the great user interface that keeps all my podcasts under control. When they began offering a yearly subscription I thought they would focus on fixing the disparity in features between Castro and the competition. This hasn’t been the case. I’m very disappointed that they didn’t support Apple Watch stand alone playback. When Apple announced the APIs were available I thought for sure Castro would be on top of it. They haven’t even mentioned supporting it in their podcasts. I cancelled my subscription. I would expect a subscription based app to support the latest features of the platform. It will be hard to win me back now that I know they don’t have the same priorities as I do when it comes to features for their app.

Truly one of the best podcast apps, with a few caveats. This podcast app is great. Arguably probably one of the best, if not the best. The fact that it organizes podcasts into an inbox so that the user can decided yay or nay on specific episodes is great. I feel like I really have fine-tuned control over my podcasts between that and being able to organize and manipulate the order of my queue on the fly. Now, the areas it could improve. The discover/search section is just not up to par with other podcast apps. If you already know what shows you care to listen to, you're pretty golden. However, if you are new to listen to podcasts or want to find new shows to listen to, this app will not be very helpful. Every modern podcast app has lots of features for discovery of podcasts. Featured sections, top charts, browse by podcast network, etc. Castro only has about 10-15 genres to browse through with like 10-20 podcasts in each. It is just not good in that regard and prevents me from giving it a full 5 stars.

My favorite podcast app. I’ve tried them all, and Castro is by far my favorite podcast app on the App Store. At the end of the day, they all just play audio files, but Castro has the most polished interface and the most relevant features that I’m looking for. The queue/inbox/archive system makes way more sense to me than a playlist system, and the per-podcast settings allow me to selectively control things like speed (for slower-speaking hosts), queue order (news and time-sensitive episodes go to the top, the rest goes to the bottom), and episode limits (so daily podcasts don't stack up). The one thing that isn’t perfect is it’s CarPlay integration. It’s a little buggy — sometimes the queue doesn’t load, and sometimes episodes won’t play unless you repeatedly mash the play button — and for some reason there’s no way to archive or skip an episode without going through the phone.

nothing better. no, not overcast.. i LIVE for this app. been using it since the pre-subscription days. gorgeous UI, everything makes sense with swipe gestures.. the inbox is perfect, i love the tiles option to show podcast cover art. i love having the inbox and queue separate.. i would love to have a separate queue for bedtime but that's another suggestion for another time. i would love an ipad/mac app but the ios app is polished, stable and beautiful. if you kept downloading overcast because you kept trying to see what everybody else saw in it and then didn't... like me... castro is for you. get castro , it's definitely worth it to support these killer developers and this perfect app.

Does not work well on Apple Watch. I have been looking long and hard to find a podcast app that actually works on Apple Watch. I have tried Overcast without success and have also now struck out with Castro. Castro has a hard time syncing to the watch and it also will not stream episodes even though I have a cellular watch. If I choose the first title on my list and ask it to play, it will act as though it is playing that episode while actually playing something totally different and random. Today it insisted that it was playing, but refused to do anything. Incredibly frustrating! I cannot even get it to sync using the “sync now” option. Currently it is trying to sync, and it has been working on two episodes for 45 minutes without success. I’m paying for Castro Plus which is quite expensive. Castro also offers no support even though you can supposedly “email support”. There is never a reply. Skip Castro and keep looking if you own an Apple Watch!

The One Thing Holding You Back…. I, along with many other people who have written a review, have tried out multiple podcast apps. There is some thing that is so clean about the UI that Castro has, the way that it’s able to build such an easy queue and help me keep track of episodes and help me discover new podcast. It’s definitely one of my favorite apps and something I use every single day. I really really just wish that there was an iPad version of the app. The lack of the iPad app has me consistently thinking if I should switch to something like the native podcast player or overcast, so that I can jump in between devices and not skip a beat. Yes I can use the iPhone app on not just my iPhone… but given that it’s 2023 I expect there to be a native version for my iPad! I hope this is coming soon.

I miss Castro 1. The first iteration of this app I found to be quite simply the best podcast app I’ve ever used. It was simple, beautiful, and had almost no bugs. I particularly liked that the UI changed colors based on the cover art of the selected podcast. This version of Castro is nice looking too, but I wish it had the dynamic colors. The added complexity/features I can tolerate, but not at the expense of all of the bugs it seems to have. Frequently it has issues downloading (popular) podcasts, and most annoying is that when I turn off my wireless headphones, or answer a phone call, the audio does not pause. This means it continues to play on the speaker, or even plays the audio OVER THE PHONE so the other person can hear the audio. It’s obnoxious. I’ll take the original (now discontinued) Castro over this version anyday.

Used to be the best. Castro used to be the best podcast app; the simplicity, the queue functionality, and a smart approach to managing lots of subscriptions into a daily playlist. Everything was well designed and worked smoothly. Yet, somehow in the last year or two things have become so buggy as to require hard-quitting the app nearly every day for it to work properly. Small bugs like the scroll bar being incorrect on a podcast archive have persisted for months. Overall it feels like this app has been abandoned, which is frustrating for me because I was a happy premium subscriber for years. I am cancelling that membership and I am at a point where I feel like I need to find, again, yet another podcast app that works reliably. I hope the Castro developers can find a path back to the simple joy their app had, but my experience as a user and a customer has gone from great to terrible over the last few years.

Fave pod player. I’ve tried a LOT of podcast players. It’s a long story. Anyway, I have not found any that work as consistently or as easily as Castro. It’s not overly fancy, but it is easy to use! There’s one queue — just tap a button to add an item to it — and the queue is super-simple to reorder, and it’s easy to automatically replace an old episode of something like an hourly news update with a new one. With the improvement of the podcast discovery options, my only (slight) gripe is that I would like to have a way to categorize my podcasts by topic/type, either multiple playlists or just some kind of grouping, while retaining the ability to easily add something to the queue. But I’m not willing to give up anything about the way Castro currently works to get it. I’ve been a very happy premium subscriber for a long time, and it’s one of the few subscriptions I don’t see ever giving up.

SO Close. This app is ALMOST perfect. I was looking for a long time for a good podcast player after losing my patience with Apple’s. This is by far the best I’ve found (so much so that I subscribed to the paid version) but it’s missing a few things to make it perfect. For one, it would be super nice to be able to sort or reverse the oder of episodes both in your inbox and on the show pages themselves. So many shows are serialized and it’s a pain to have to scroll all the way to the bottom, especially when there are a lot of episodes. Also, while I like the queue feature, I would love to be able to just click play on my inbox or on a specific show and it runs through all my episodes there, without having to add them individually to the queue. I know you can set it up to have new episodes automatically added to your queue, so this feature would mainly be helpful when you want to just plow through an entire show at once. Finally, it would be super convenient to add all episodes from a show to your inbox at once, so you don’t have to drag each episode over individually. Overall, it’s a slick, easy to use app!

Support. My favorite podcast app. This is my go to app for podcasts.....for now. This app gives you a logical new way to organize your podcasts which is a breath of fresh air when it seems like podcast apps just try to out feature their competition while all being similar in their interfaces. This one focuses on organization which is both simple and smart. Why knock off 2 stars? App support seems to be lacking. Clicking feedback link in the app sends an email to the devs. The catch? No acknowledgement and no fix. One of the 6 podcasts I subscribe to doesn't display entire episode history and only shows 6 total episodes out of 30+ that I can listen to. Apple podcasts and my second fav podcast app 'pocket casts' both display the entire episode history. Feedback sent and issue still exists. As much as I hate to say it if I have to go another app to hear one of my podcasts that doesn't work in this app I will drop Castro for the simple reasoning that if a paid app cannot provide me the content that free podcasting app built into iOS can, it's time to move onto something better. Just not practical to have multiple apps that have the simple function of playing a sound file.

My favorite podcast app!. Castro is hands down my favorite podcast app. Easy to search, browse, play, and import podcast RSS and URL links. I use it daily! I think the premium features are worth the purchase, but not worth a yearly subscription. The “enhance voice” feature works really well, but sounds just like some extra compression and EQ to make podcasts sounds a bit more radio ready, which I could accomplish in 5 minutes in a DAW. Still, makes listening a better experience. I would encourage the developer to move away from the subscription model and offer a la carte options to users for 1) an ad free experience, and 2) additional features such as Apple Watch playback, audio enhancement, and silence skipping. I rarely choose to opt in to a subscription model unless I am really floored by a piece of software. To Castro’s credit, I have subscribed, but it did take over 6 months to make that decision, whereas I would have committed to purchasing a la carte features within a week. I have still given the app 5 stars due to the quality, design, and features available. This app has a great team behind it, and it shows in my day-to-day usage. I hope Castro continues to deliver high-quality updates and adds additional features to justify my yearly subscription!

Best-in-class podcast management. Castro has my favorite method of managing incoming podcasts: an inbox where new podcasts are shown, and a queue of podcasts I’ve decided to listen to. This leaves me feeling much more in control of which podcasts I listen to and in which order. All other major features are there as you’d expect: voice boost, flexible playback speed, watch support, widget support. And a feature I haven’t seen anywhere else: pre-selection of chapters. This means you can set up a podcast to only play back the parts you’re interested in, skipping over dull topics without any extra intervention on your part. The only major gap is support for Airplay 2, which means there’s a significant lag in the playback controls when streaming to Airplay speakers. It’s also slightly beaten by Overcast in playback quality when using voice boost or modified playback speed.

I love this app. I love everything about this app. The design—I love how compact the episodes are in the queue. So many other podcast apps are bloated design-wise, where you can only see 3 or so episodes at a time. I hate that. I don’t want to be inundated with info. I just wanna see the titles. I love the drag and drop (in particular the ability to move multiple items at once.) The inbox is brilliant. There some podcasts with multiple formats of which I only like one. This allows me to archive the others without having them dumped in my queue and downloaded. But my hands down favorite features are the archive & history. There are some podcasts that I don’t listen to on a regular basis but like to check in on every so often. This allows me to follow them so that I don’t forget about them but to go find an episode when I want to. And of course history. I’m usually on the go when listening and don’t have time to note episodes I really enjoy. With the history I can do back and see what I heard. Sometimes the impact of an episode doesn’t hit for a week or more. With history I can still go find them. Simple but essential. And the dates they were listened to on is saved as well! —just an impressive level of care. Fingers crossed for smart speed/silence skipping, a speed between 2x & 3x and custom playback settings for individual shows — nobody should listen to Song Exploder at 2x.

ABANDONED: DO NOT SUBSCRIBE. Update: My previous review was hopeful in light of a flurry of useless updates. Since those updates it’s been total radio silence from the developers. Their servers are down now, so you can’t listen to new episodes and searching for podcasts is broken. Safe to say this is abandonware and you should NOT download or subscribe. The developers, after a year of inactivity are FINALLY updating the app. Unfortunately they’re completely unresponsive to support requests, emails, tweets, etc. They don’t take into consideration any feedback and have started adding features to the app that nobody is asking for, rather than fixing and improving what is desperately needed. There are basic issues and missing features in CarPlay and the Apple Watch. For example, CarPlay has no chapter support — something the much cheaper competitor, Overcast, has had for years. Castro is slow and buggy when reordering podcasts in the queue. The app frequently cuts out audio completely when trying to play via CarPlay or when switching AirPlay inputs. Lock Screen playback controls almost never work. The app is slow to load, and seems to get slower with each update. The most recent new features have had ugly UI that doesn’t match the rest of the app (which looks great). Please, please, prioritize bug fixes and improvements to existing features on all platforms. And PLEASE, a reply to an email or tweet every now and then would be MUCH appreciated.

Clean, Simple, Fantastic, ONE complaint. I’m a picky guy, and to me this is the perfect podcast player. First of all, the mental model of an inbox is exactly what I was looking for. Simple to understand, and keeps you from being overwhelmed if you follow a lot of podcasts. Also, since you’re less likely to be overwhelmed, you end up following more podcasts, and getting exposed to great content you would not otherwise have listens to. The UI is gorgeous and is perfected down to the last detail. I happily pay The subscription for this app, and you should do the same. Now, the one complaint. If I am trying to start a series of podcasts before going on a long road trip and I have poor connectivity, the user experience is very confusing. I’ll move a bunch of stuff into the playlist queue, but because the connectivity is poor, many things will start and then stop downloading and I’ll get spammed by a flurry of could not download alerts. This behavior surprises me, because as far as I can tell, my settings are such that these podcasts should already be downloaded. Other than this complaint, the app is great!

Still no trim silences?. UPDATE: Lowering my review to two stars. The fact that there's still not trim silences is kind of unbelievable. It feels at this point like the developers are just folding their arms and pouting and putting their feet down because they're tired of the requests, but I've listened to their podcasts and I know they understand that this is easily the biggest, most requested missing feature. It just baffles me that they would rather dedicate so much development time to other features than just buckle down and add this one that is absolutely standard in today's podcast player market. Not to mention they still don't save playback settings per podcast or support chapter markers. What? It's a wonderful, unique app in a lot of ways, but it's missing crucial features that hold it back. It's kind of heartbreaking. ORIGINAL: I want to love Castro, but to me, trim silences should be considered a standard feature in a modern podcast app. I've tried to get into Castro so many times now because they add such cool stuff with their big updates and the general hook of treating podcasts like an email inbox, but it's been months and trim silences, a long-requested feature, is still nowhere to be seen. (As well, I want Castro to remember playback speed settings for each podcast.) So yet again, back to boring old Overcast for me.

Used to be my favorite podcast player until.... This used to be my favorite podcast player, after using apple’s podcast app for the longest time. I even purchased the app back when it cost money to own and use, not sure if its free now or not. I loved the clean, hassle free functionality of the app and it was the only podcast player on my phone for the longest time. This was definitely a 5 star app back when they didn't require you to pay for a subscription in order to use all the functions of the app. Now, I understand that everything is moving to the subscription thing because every service tries to continue making money someway but I just opened the app today, went to the inbox and noticed that they added promoted adds at the bottom, which by the way totally ruins the clean look of the app but I also went into the options to see if this was something I accidentally turned on, but come to find out, its a new feature which can not be turned off without a subscription. This would be totally fine if this was a free app, but mined you, I purchased the app already and I have a problem with app creators who limit your functionality even after you purchased their product. So, because of this, the app has dropped down to a one until this is fixed. By the way, all functionality should be available for those that have already payed for the app. Your customers shouldn't have to pay twice!

So Smooth. I moved from Overcast to Castro a while ago because of the queue system. I love that every podcast I want to listen to is in the queue waiting to go. Furthermore I love how clean the UI is, and how it flows between light and dark modes. The siri features they just added are also absolutely amazing if you spend a lot of time driving; you can now interact with the app to a tremendous degree without touching the screen. My only complaint is the notification system only half works right now due to changes in ios13. Castro is aware of the issue and I assume will be fixing it soon. Basically notifications only work if you have the app in the foreground which if you listen to the app a lot is not an issue. I am also so happy this app moved to subscriptions so that there is some kind of impetus to both add new features and keep it up to do with current ios. I cannot overstate how much I love this app, and I want it to exist for many years to come.

Feature: Favorite (Star) Specific Episodes. For a long time I used the Apple Podcast app before realizing that there might be something better out there. Specifically, I wanted to “Favorite” certain podcast episodes that I believed stood out from the rest so that I could hear them again in the future. Nothing seemed to satisfy this need I had, at least not in a user friendly way, until I found Castro. In the beginning Castro’s UI can be sort of hard to get used to, but after a while you understand how to use it, and you realize that those weird things that you didn’t understand how to use, actually help you take even more control of your podcast experience. So far, it really is the best podcast app I have tried and it definitely satisfies what I was looking for. I don't see myself moving to another app any time soon.

I really want to like Castro. Castro seemed like the perfect podcast app for me. I’m not big on playlists, and I subscribe to around 40 podcasts. The inbox and queue was a great fit. It had some flaws that just proved fatal. First, I had problems with Castro and CarPlay. If I tied to resume, in CarPlay, a podcast episode I began when not connected to CarPlay, then the “time indicator” would move when I pressed play, but I would get no sound. I would have to hit pause and play again, sometimes several times, before I got sound. Secondly, Castro seems to really want strong WiFi our cellular connections. Several times while in weak connections, Castro would not be able to download podcasts. Overcast and Pocket Casts could download. They would be slow, but they could download. Finally, there is no way to automatically sort podcast episodes. Often, when I discover a new podcast, I like to download a lot of its back catalog. You can do this in Castro (by manually downloading each episode) but you couldn’t select for the episodes to be sorted by publication date or shutting like that. I found these problems to be extremely aggravating because Castro is so close to being my perfect app. When something comes so close, it just makes the “shortfalls” so much more significant.

Great (Enhanced) Audio quality, some key features missing. Probably the best sounding podcast app with the Enhanced Audio feature enabled. It took me some time to get use to the UI/UX but I think I got it. I've been using PocketCast (Overcast before that) whose interface I find quite appealing, but leaves something to be desired when it comes to Audio quality. Having said that, couple of key things I think are still missing for it to be the very best in terms of management. It's not clear how I can download and keep multiple episodes of podcast like Dan Carlin's Hardcore history for say a airplane ride or sometime in the future without mucking up my queue. Archiving them would delete the episodes and some of these are free for only limited period so that wouldn't work. As far as I understand, only queued episodes are downloaded. Would like to be able to download and keep the episodes without adding it to the queue. Second, I do fly a lot and it's extremely annoying to not have the podcast notes along with the download when up in the air. Please fix this! Pocketcasts has this basic feature. These are the only features preventing me from completely switching over. Cheers!

The Best…and under new management.. I’m a longtime Castro user and couldn’t be happier. There are many features that I love about it, but if I could only pick one, it would be the relationship between the inbox and the queue. All new episodes of podcast you subscribe to are loaded into the inbox. From there you get to choose which ones you put in your queue to listen to and which ones you discard. that alone makes the podcast jungle manageable. If you love a podcast, you can set it to automatically load into your queue whenever a new one arrives. In the queue, it’s a simple drag and drop operation to set the order in which the podcasts play. The standard trim silence and enhance voices is available, but more exclusively you can sideload and clip for a subscription fee that amounts to about $1.50 a month. Well worth it for regular podcast listeners. There was a brief moment while the app was in ownership transition that it was unstable (and I began the stages of grief), but that period seems to be over. I’ve had great response from customer service, and the app has performed beautifully since. I hope you will download the app, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Someone finally did it. Updated review: When Castro was new, it came with some original and game-changing features. Its queue alone made it my daily podcast app. Other apps have caught up, however, and Castro has remained the same. Overcast has a good queue now, and also has iPadOS and macOS apps that sync playback. You could even make the argument that Castro has gone backwards; I’m still annoyed about the removal of landscape mode. Castro is a good app, but has failed to make appreciable improvements. After years of being a proselytizer, I’m moving on. Original review: Castro is the best podcasting app. Someone (Supertop) finally figured how to bring all these features together in an intuitive and useful way. I've been very happy with it since I first got it. The way I listen to many podcasts is finally painless and even enjoyable. Here's what I do: - Listen to new episodes of podcasts I like as they come out - Listen to old episodes of those podcasts - sometimes in order, sometimes randomly - Keep favorite episodes of those podcasts that I can listen to on demand With Castro's queue, inbox, archives, and favorites, I can do all of those things without having to blast my entire queue and start from scratch each time. It's so nice! I used to use 3 separate podcast apps to listen to podcasts how I want to listen to them. Now I have one and only one: Castro!

Pretty reliable in a bad interface. Most of its features work as intended, but the interface is kind of clumsy. Instead of giving me one download queue, it gives me a separate queue for each of my subscriptions. So I have to look through all my subscriptions to find what’s new. And while it deletes things that I’ve already listened to, it doesn’t remove them from the queues! It doesn’t even gray them out. It has lots of symbols displayed on the corners of the icons, but I haven’t found a glossary to tell me what they mean, and it’s not always obvious. What makes it worse is that it never uses tool tips, so I can’t hold down the button to find out what it does or what the symbols mean. On top of all that, episodes appear in my queues before they’ve even been downloaded. So if I’m listening while I’m driving, it sometimes stops and asks if I want to listen over cellular data. I never want to interact with it when I’m driving, and I live in a hilly area, where cellular data isn’t even available! Finally, I added some episodes to my playlist that hadn’t been downloaded yet. The next day, when I started listening, they still hadn’t been downloaded!

More FAQ answers needed. I’ve been using this app for quite a while and never had any problems, but then suddenly my subscriptions stopped updating. Long story short,I read and reread the few help questions and answers but got no help from them. I went online and got no help there either. I ended up deleting and reinstalling the app three times and it seems the podcasts are updating, but now there’s no podcast cover art for roughly 90% of the episodes. I went back to their help page and the internet in general and no one addressed this anywhere. My suggestion to Castro is that they add solutions to these ongoing problems in their help page so we have some way to fix the problem. A refresh button would be helpful for when the app stops functioning properly.

I love it!. I used the default Apple Podcasts app for years and *hated* it, but I could never find an app I thought could suitably replace it, either. Castro does everything I always wanted an app to do: Downloads are easy, queuing up what I want to hear is a breeze (simply drag and drop in the order you want), you’re able to turn off whether you want the episodes to play continuously or stop, playback speeds are easy to control, and best of all, there’s a “sleep” option, where you can tell Castro to stop playing anything after a certain number of minutes. Some nights I like to listen to podcasts to help me sleep, but of course with Apple Podcasts this meant it’d keep playing ALL of the episodes in my queue, one after another, after I fell asleep. Not with Castro :). There are even more great features in the paid version, but for right now, I’m happy with the free version! Why the star docked? Castro’s one big fault is it’s navigation. There are certain screens you can navigate to where it’s impossible to tell how in the world you can get back to the “Home” screen. Sometimes I have to close out the app entirely just so I can get back to a screen I recognize. It’s really not too terrible, but it’s still a pretty big oversight. A “Home” screen might exist on those screens, but it’s definitely not obvious, and it should be. Overall, I’m really happy with this app and will be recommending it to anyone who loves podcasts!

Great…until recent update.. I have been using Castro for years and am a paid subscriber. It has (had?) the best UI of all the podcast apps. I occasionally check on several others to see what, if anything, has changed enough to knock Castro from my #1 spot. It safely outshines them all. But this most recent update? Just terrible. I don’t mind that it looks a little different. But seriously, when you delete a show from the Queue it should go away. One push of the “X” and that’s it. Why would deleting something then give me the option to save, play or shuffle the queue position? Just delete it and go back to the remaining queue like before. Same issue with episodes in the Inbox. Updates should make things cleaner and easier. I’m sure this was not the intended result. Please fix this with another update sooooooon! A near perfect app is now a clunky mess.

Makes Podcasts Better. I love this app. The best thing about it is I can organize individual episodes in the queue by whether I want to watch them soon or later. Its great for long drives where I can fit in multiple episodes. I also love how episodes can easily be dragged into different places on the list or into the inbox, and that episodes are marked if I have already listened to them. The option to favorite episodes is also very useful. I love all the features. My only issue is that its hard to look up individual episodes as easily as apple podcasts. Also I wish there were an Alexa skill! That's my only problem with the app, but possible new features that would be helpful are related podcast/episode suggestions and social features.

Excellent UI. Of the popular iOS podcast players, Castro has the best UI by far (I also tried Overcast and Pocket Casts). Castro is unique and innovative in its approach to podcast and episode management. I love the inbox and the queue concepts. They work very well, especially for people like me who don’t listen to every single episode of every podcast they subscribe to. The Castro UI is quite polished and there are nice little touches sprinkled across the app (like the theme switch animation, and the easily accessible newest and oldest episodes when looking at a new podcast). Compared to Castro, Pocket Casts’s UI is even more polished, but very basic and conservative. Overcast somehow manages to be both basic and clunky at the same time. Castro does not have some of the advanced features from other players (chapter support, silence shortening), but I prefer a UI that actually makes listening more enjoyable.

Exactly what I didn’t know I always wanted!!. This app is in my opinion the best way to listen to podcasts. I want a constant stream that I can curate as I go, and preferably is somewhat automated. Well, this is it! So great for long drives. It’s basically already going to play everything you know you want to hear, and then you can go in and add some others that you are subscribed to but don’t always listen to. I just love this app! I have one complaint. The art for the each podcast frequently does not show up (it’s just a bunch of little gray boxes) and because there is such minimal info in the list (otherwise a pro) you only get to see the episode title. I don’t necessarily know which podcast is going to have an episode called “Resistance is futile” so I have to tap each episode to see which podcast it is. If the no art bug did not exist, this would basically be a perfect app. Thank you!

Folders feature is broken.. This is my favorite podcast player, but I’m giving it a low rating right now, because the new feature, folders, works pretty much the opposite of how you would think it does. When you have the folder up on the screen and press play, it plays the first episode on the list but then goes immediately to the next item on your main queue. And when you have the main queue up on your screen, and you play the first episode on it, it plays the next episode on the folder rather than the next episode on the main queue. This is baffling and does not make any sense. Also, I don’t think that an episode should appear on the main queue at all if it’s in a folder. That just is confusing and counterintuitive. If they fix these bugs, then I would definitely be willing to give the app five stars once again. I’ve tried emailing support, but never got any response.

Can’t download and can’t get support. I hate to write this review, because I bought Castro for $30 and loved it for about three months. During this time, I subscribef to all my favorite podcasts, found new ones and set them all to start in so I would miss the commercials. Then, I started having trouble downloading certain podcasts, which turned into an inability to download or stream ANY podcasts. I went to the support selection on the menu and sent logs and pleas for Help. In an effort to fix my problem, I tried all kinds of things myself, including turning cellular download off and on as well as deleting the app, and reinstalling it. When I reinstalled it, I was unable to get my subscription to activate so I sent another email to Castro through the support link. There has been no response. I’ve gone back to Downcast for my Podcasts for now but I’m writing this review in the hope that I will finally gee a response from Castro. I’ll bet the answer to my issue isn’t even that difficult.

Perfect for daily listeners. This is the perfect app for heavy/daily podcast listeners. The drag and drop queue feature and being able to auto queue your favorites makes organizing a long list of new podcasts easy. The app is not the best for going back and listening to old episodes of a particular podcast however as the archive is little tedious to get through in my opinion. If you stay up to date on your podcasts, this appeal meant for you. One feature I would love to see added is a clock on the queue screen that totals up his many minutes/hours I have in the queue. This would be great for when I'm getting my podcasts ready for a day at work or especially for long drives and I don't want to have to worry about browsing for more episodes of my queue runs out.

Used to be better. I really like this app. It was hands down my favorite pod catcher app. I have been a Castro plus member for the last 2 years. But now there are several problems that make me want to look elsewhere. First off, there are problems with CarPlay, in which paused podcasts don’t resume until I skip backward first. Also, the Inbox doesn’t update when I connect my phone to CarPlay; I have to open the app on the phone first to get the Inbox refreshed( not the safest thing to do in a moving car!) Another bug, podcasts don’t always resume where I left off. Instead, they resume about a minute or two earlier. Icons are very slow to appear when opening the Inbox, Queue, and Library. I have reported the CarPlay problems to support several times but only get the same generic “Thank you for reporting this issue”

Excellent save for one issue. Excellent podcast player. There is one issue that bugs me personally though and that is if network conditions are spotty, the podcast dings out and then gives a red notification in the app stating as much. I work outside and have to wear gloves while driving machinery so although the network might be spotty it comes back right away. However the episode I was listening to does not attempt to reconnect and even if I select it again it still does not play. I have to quit the app restart it and then when I select the episode I was listening to it starts from the beginning which is annoying if I am a long ways into an already long podcast. This isn’t something I can just stop working for and deal with. It’s not much more than an inconvenience any other time, but it’s forcing me to try other apps that don’t have this issue, and since I really love the work put into Castro and enjoy its many other advantages. Please fix it. I’m happy to give it top rating regardless but sure am counting on you to read this and fix it. Sorry but had no o cancel the subscription as the issue of stopping the podcast stream for anything but the clearest signal has not been addressed at all. Moved on to other players that can keep streaming should the connection weaken. Don’t understand why this was so difficult to do but maybe in the future somewhere down the road it will be.

The complacency of no competition. I was very excited when this app first came out. The side loading capability in particular and the player that works with it are unusual. The podcasting functions are on a par with others such as Overcast. Sadly, my enthusiasm has dwindled. I have sent multiple queries to the development and support team with no response. Most importantly, The sideloading functionality is so limited that one wonders why bother and not just use iCloud on your iPhone to play audio files. If the sideload function allowed searching within your side loads that might ameliorate this situation. Better still would be the ability to re-order the side loads either by alphabetical ordering or buy other parameters such as date created date loaded etc. as Audio grows, I’m sure someone will figure out these problems and solve them. For the time being lack of competition means that Castro is all there is for those who want to use such things right now. It’s tragic.

Declining quality and spreading extremist content. Well this used to be my favorite Podcast app but I suppose after almost 3 years of daily use I’ll be looking elsewhere. As others have noted, the quality and functionality have both severely declined in recent months; not all podcast feeds are updating properly where they do update seamlessly on other apps, and so if your favorite podcast is available “wherever podcasts are found” you still may not see it on Castro. Episodes that only partially download will mark themselves as “complete” when you finish them, so 5 minutes into your episode your app tells you that you’re done listening and you can’t replay it. But far worse, they automatically subscribed me to Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly. This far right propaganda - unapologetically fascist in the case of Matt Walsh - is so unconscionably offensive to me as a trans woman. this is where I go to listen to podcasts about protecting myself in the world from people exactly like Matt Walsh and now the app wants to shove this crap down my throat. Absolutely not. Have a fun weepy slide down the shower wall this evening devs and product managers, you are spreading content that is going to get someone killed. From the bottom of my heart, I hope this app crashes and burns now. Shame on you

Phone app great, watch app unusable. I’ve tried a wide range of podcast clients and found Castro’s simple “queue first/queue last” approach to be the best way to manage lots of subscriptions. Enhanced voice, trim silence, and sped-up audio all work well and are great for digesting a lot of content quickly. Unfortunately, the Watch App is unusable when audio is played at a fast rate. The app downsamples bitrate so much when transferring to watch that when sped up there is an “echo” effect that makes this unusable as a watch client. I end up using Overcast on the watch as it works better on this front, but this results in having to maintain two separate queues on different devices. It the Castro developers could address this shortcoming on the watch, I would be very happy to give the app five stars and switch back to a single solution!

Absolutely Awful. While I like the idea of the library management feature, the utter lack of standard features like sorting episodes by oldest to newest or marking episodes as played is baffling to me. As someone who was new to this app but not new to podcasts, I have shows I subscribe to that I’ve already listened to many many episodes of, yet there was no option to sort flag those I had previously heard as played, so I ended up with the entire episode library for those podcasts. Literally thousands of previously listened to episodes sitting in my library. Come on! These are basic functions inherent in all podcast apps... how are you going to exclude core functionality?? Also, every feature this app DOES have, including basics like playback speed, require a paid subscription. I get paying for the bells and whistles, but this is paying for the standard features that all other decent podcast players provide for free. Completely disappointed! Can’t get this app off my phone fast enough.

New favorite podcast app, almost perfect. After being so frustrated by Apple Podcast’s frequent and confusing app updates, I went looking for a new podcast app. Castro has been SO much better. It’s simplistic but has all the needed features. The only frustrating thing is that the queue doesn’t act like a music playlist. If you start playing an episode halfway down the list, it instantly bumps it to the top of the queue. This means that, if this episode is in a series, I have to manually drag however many episodes are in that series up to the top if I want to use continuous play. I wish the Castro queue worked like a music playlist instead where you can start wherever you want on your queue and it’ll play down the queue from there.

A Pleasure. Why do podcast apps find it frequently difficult to treat podcast audio files like audio files. Apple podcasts scratched the itch well enough but started adding oddities like ignoring my playlist to download files I’d purposefully skipped or marking episodes as new because I stopped at the end credits. Glad I decided to switch. Castro has been sleek, simple, and a pleasure to use. Turn it on, and it plays uninterrupted as long as I want, even without WiFi or data. So simple a purpose but Castro seems to be the only one willing to do that for me. My only criticism is it does it too well. Would love to see an option where I can have it play my queue sequentially instead of jumping back to the top of the stack. I’ve got an extensive list of podcasts of different types and sometimes I need to switch it up if the mood takes me but at work or in the car I can’t reorder my queue on a whim.

LOVE THIS APP (Part 2). I still LOVE this app. It’s the only podcast app that works with my brain. However, I would say that a few more bugs have been creeping in lately and there’s still some much promised features (SYNC - must have, iPad app, etc.) that haven’t shipped yet. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I know I’d feel so much better about the project if I heard something/anything from the developer with regard to 1) sign of life and 2) some sort of timeline of some of these features and bug fixes. My subscription will be up soon and I want to say that it’s renewal is not contingent on this, I’m happy to pay for such a great idea and app. But I would love to still recommend to friends and family and knowing it’s still actively being developed and iterated would make it a much more solid recommendation from me. Thank you for the great work so far and hope there’s much more coming!

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Castro is freezing and not streaming. Came here as a last resort. For the past 2 days Castro has stopped streaming episodes. I can’t find any solutions on the Castro website for this particular problem and there are no options in the settings to deal with it. I’ve tried archiving some episodes but the app crashes after I’ve done that a few times (and it’s pretty well crashing for no reason anyway). My next step will be to uninstall it - just hope I don’t lose all my subscriptions.

Amazing podcast client!. The reason Castro is my preferred podcast client over Overcast & Pocket Casts is the timely and super powerful development updates, taking advantage of all the latest iOS release enhancements. Can’t recommend Castro highly enough!

Good. But buggy.. Sometimes you open the app and it does not load anything and shows a blank white screen. Sometimes it crashes for some reason. Sometimes you can’t browse for new shows. “Host error” or something to the effect of. Other than that. It works well. Clean and fast. Just very buggy.

From full buyer to freemium user. I bought it a year ago. It’s decent, but it definitely has its drawbacks. I bought it outright and paid $4.99 for it. There was no subscriber model at the time. Then a year or two later, they screw over their early adopters, put up ads and charge you to get rid of them even though they’ve made almost zero worthwhile improvements. The app still can’t do search properly. Unless you type in the exact starting words of a podcast, it won’t find it. Any slight variation won’t pick up the name of the podcast you want. How they have a worse search function than the normal apple Podcast app is beyond me. Also, you can’t search by episode name or guest. So you have to search for stuff on the apple Podcast app, and then switch over to Castro once you find what you’re looking for.

Elegant. Castro is an intelligent, well executed new idea among podcast apps. It won't work for everyone but if it suits your consumption style it'll do wonders for your listening life. Update March 2023: this lasted version is very buggy :(

Trimendous. I still get confused here and there but the triage method of dealing with podcasts has made Castro the easiest and most understandable way to manage your media.

App crashing. This is a very good especially with voice over, but some times during a podcast, it crashes and has to be restarted. I am using an i phone se-2020 and latest i o s.

Interface and Usability. There are plenty of podcast apps out there but sorting through them and finding the episodes you actually want to listen to when you want to is the hard part. Castro automates all of that and let’s you have them all preloaded in a playlist beat and tidy. Well worth the $.

Fantastic podcast app. I’m new to Castro thanks to a macstories review. It is the best podcast app I have used. The triage system to set up your listening playlist is very intuitive and efficient. This app has increased my enjoyment of podcasts in one short week. Kudos to the team at Castro.

No way to contact developers. Why is this? I’m a paid up subscriber and the app uses 18GB of data but I only have the first few podcasts in my queue downloaded at any one time. I saw your recent update tried to address this but it hasn’t changed how much your app takes up on my phone. Your app is actually great, much better than Apple’s, but until this is fixed, I’m starting to get no-memory warnings so won’t be putting the star rating up

My favourite podcast app. It beats Apple Podcasts, The Podcast App, Overcast, Podbean, Pocket Casts, Castbox, etc etc by virtue of its UX design. I love the layout of the queue, inbox, library and search tab. It’s neat, pretty, easy to navigate and just nice to use. Thanks so much!

Almost awesome. By far the best podcast app I have used - and I’ve tried many. It would be perfect if you could sort episodes from oldest to newest...seems like a pretty basic feature. Sort that and it’s definitely 5 stars.

Broken on Apple Watch and CarPlay. I really enjoy the aps layout and features, unfortunately bugs make it almost unusable. Apple Watch and CarPlay bugs have been consistent and reproducible for the 11 months I have payed for the subscription. I won’t be renewing once my year is up. Very disappointed and would not recommend if you want to use on the Apple Watch or CarPlay.

not what it was. This used to be a wonderful app as Castro 2, one of my favourites for my iPhone. It let me subscribe to podcasts, and then before a long trip browse the ready ones and download them onto the phone for listening in an order of my choosing. Exactly what I wanted. There was a little hiccup with podcast subscriptions not being carried across to a new phone via the iTunes backup. They fixed that, even if too late for me. But Castro 3 has been a parade of bugs. There was the one where it skipped 20s of audio if you switched away from Bluetooth audio to another car source (seemingly fixed if not acknowledged). There was the one where each podcast in the queue woud start playing at a random time offset instead of the start - my favourite being the time it started 0s from the end and immediately deleted the download, and of course suppressed it from the subscription feed since it had already been "listened" to. That too is seemingly fixed now, and if it was in the release notes I missed it. The current showstopper is that it just sometimes freezes if you park the car and come back to it. Castro still has the audio focus, because I can see that from the home screen when I next leave the car. The app is now useless to me, because where I live it is not permitted to touch the phone even if stopped in a traffic jam. I wish I could be kinder, as this was an innovative app, but it's useless to me now.

Good app but pretty buggy. Great podcast queue feature but the app seems to have bugs like not being able to connect to a podcast feed that you’re already subscribed too and it worked fine yesterday. It’s happening with all the feeds in the app and they work fine in other apps so assume it must be Castro. A lot of times episodes will fail to play or buffer a lot too. I’m on a 500mb wifi connection and network is running fine so also assume it’s Castro. If they fix the reliability issues it would be a 4 or 5 star

Fantastic app. I have used a few podcast apps over the years. One whose name escapes me, the apple one, Pocketcast, Overcast and now Castro. Castro fits the bill best for my usage - I subscribe to a lot of podcasts but don't want to download every episode as it comes out - eitehr because I am not interested in them all or to watch my bandwidth. Castro's triage method - new episodes show up in the in tray and then you decide to download or not - is great. Perfect for my usage. There is only one playlist - your downloaded episodes - but I have found that on the whole that is the way I used other apps. It only fails when you find a new podcast and want to download a mass of episodes to listen to at varying times later - an edge case which I slide over to Overcast to manage. The latest version brings silence cutting (which has become the rage) but I don't use it - tried it and it sounds fine though. It doesn't play video, but it will play an audio stream of a video podcast (ABC Insiders I am looking at you) which is great. There is also a nice flying squid easter egg screen. I don't think I mentioned that it looks great? It does and even better

Smart Podcast management. A Smart and easy way to manage podcasts with some nice extra features.

Nice concept, poor execution. I wanted to love this app. But a parade of serious bugs ended with me deleting it today. First, it refused to download any podcast episode, and would not let me scrub through them at all. Then later somehow this got fixed, and now it's just stopped updating my podcasts altogether. I was wondering why I hadn't had any episodes in a while — even though I was subscribed Castro just didn't download them. Now I have to catch up in a new app. The basic mechanics of a podcast app need to work before I can entrust them with my podcasts.

Hands down the best podcast app.. I’ve been listening to podcasts for years. I was a loyal user of another app.. but this one won me over instantly. The queue system is excellently the recommendation articles are also very good. Thank you !

Stand alone watch playback does not work. Stand alone watch playback has been buggy since its release and the developer refuses to fix the issues. I am not sure why they would advertise the functionality, let alone be included in the paid subscription. I have reached out to the developer to fix the problem and they have ignored the problem. Do not subscribe to this app for stand alone watch playback, it does not work.

Particularly good for road trips. Great app, makes it really easy to queue up podcasts for driving. I also like the feature of being able to favourite or archive episodes.

Hmmm…. There was a time when I really liked this app. I paid for the Castro Plus upgrade for several years. I am always looking for something better and found several other podcast players I liked better so moved on. In the last few days I have looked again at Castro (my current player of choice - Overcast - has a few issues and the developer seems uninterested in addressing). So I downloaded Castro and began the setup process. Why did I bother. This has to be one of the most awkward apps to configure, especially when compared with alternatives like PocketCast. When you get it going it’s Ok on a phone but is plain ugly on my iPad. There is no iCloud sync, you backup one device and then restore that backup to the other device. REALLY!!! Four of my twenty three subscribed podcasts have no artwork and no way to restore it (all podcast artwork is there in PocketCast and there’s a simple way to restore it if needed). The triage of new episodes is a really nice feature. In summary, Castro has been uninstalled and Overcast is not far behind. Regards, Peter

Best Podcast App so far. I’ve used overcast and apples refill app and this one is better. My opinion at least.

Best ever. Oh my god. I didn’t know listening to podcasts could be so good or so easy. They have literally thought of everything I never knew I wanted to do. 😍

Major design change since subscription model. I remember having bought this in 2020 for it’s innovative design but they’ve redesigned the app to be like any other app. Also, a little disappointing that they didn’t grandfather early patrons like me into the Plus subscription like PocketCasts did. My daily driver used to be PocketCasts but I’m now slowly transitioning to Snipd for the cool AI summary and snippet features and community options it has.

Excellent UI, very simple to use.. Overcast was my former go-to podcast client, until I signed up for the Castro 7-day trial. I love how easy it is to sort through episodes in the Inbox, as I don’t always listen to every episode of a show. The only issue I have, is the Discover section could show podcast recommendations, like Overcast does, but apart from that, it’s perfect for the way I listen the podcasts.

Everything I ever wanted. Loving it! Worth the money. The inboxing and queuing system is brilliant. Variable playback speed is a must for me and it’s great in Castro. Wish I had paid the money sooner. Should have too, given I listen to hours of podcasts a day. Tolerated Apple podcasts for way too long. Was pretty happy with Overcast until I found a deal-breaking bug. Found Castro and am stoked. Feature request: I would love it if the queue told me how many hours of podcasts I have downloaded. I have the app set to cap downloads at unlimited hours but it would be nice if the top of the queue told me how many hours of listening I have queued up. Good for making sure I have enough downloaded for a trip.

A podcast app that behaves like you expect it to. Intuitive. Episodes play in the order you want and expect they will. Has all the trimmings you’d expect in a pretty package. Downloadable episodes on phone and watch is super handy for a long drive through places with poor reception or a long walk with just your watch.

Switched from Apple podcasts and love it. So much better, I’m very happy I switched. The user experience is far superior. It does what you need and more. And no more losing all my saved playlist which is what happened with Apple podcasts. Thank you team Castro 🙌

Particularly useful if you subscribe to a lot of podcasts. I've tried 7 or 8 different podcast apps, but I always ended up coming back to Downcast because it's full-featured - until Castro. The queue concept lets you sort the chaff as you download. Give it a go, it's an effective way of freeing up Gbs of unlistened podcasts from your phone.

The watch sync is buggy!. I bought the premium for the watch sync feature because I have an Apple Watch without cellular and I like to go out without my phone just with the watch and listen to my podcasts. Unfortunately the watch sync is so buggy. Out of 10 episodes there might be only one or two that actually get synced to the watch and it still shows every episode has been synced on the app. Then when you play on the watch, all of these different episodes plays the same single copy that synced without prompting any errors. It’s so frustrating because you can’t even tell whether it is synced properly until you actually listen to it and also there’s nothing you can do but deleting all of them and sync again, which is going to be unsuccessful again!

Queue is great, discovery not so much. I really like the queue management in Castro... this has been my podcast app for the last two years. But I've now ditched it after too many discovery failures - search for a podcast and it's not found on Castro but can be found on others.

Love this app, but….. Castro has completely revolutionized the way I listen to podcasts. The approach is simple but perfect. However, I won’t be able to continue using it, if the issue persists in iOS 16 of psome odcasts not being playable. This has happened with several podcasts I listen to. There is nothing I can do in the app to make them play. The problem isn’t at host level because the podcasts work in other apps. Hoping you guys are able to find a workaround. Your app has saved my sanity. Long live Castro.

Great so far. Am trying this after apple podcasts kept crashing. Am enjoying the features and paid the low cost to upgrade.

Best Podcast App. Easily the best podcast app available for iOS. Easy to use and works so well. The developers are also very keen to provide timely bug-fixes. Can’t recommend highly enough.

Good design but one big problem. The iPhone app is well designed and has all the functions I want. I went premium to be able to sync to my Apple Watch. Syncing works well (much better than the native Apple podcast app) and there’s an option to manually push episodes to your watch (love!). One big problem on the Apple Watch app though: when hitting play on episodes of one particular podcast (The Economist Radio), other random podcasts will play. Seems like the episodes of this podcast are getting matched up with the wrong audio. Please fix this! If it’s not resolved soon, I will be taking my business elsewhere.

Latest release seems buggy. The latest update was a long time coming and seemingly “only” added categorisation labels to the top of queue/inbox, but I have a hunch that it also included a lot of changes behind the scenes as there are small UI bugs now which weren’t there before. Also the app’s Twitter account seems dormant which is concerning. I’m a paid subscriber for this app so I hope these things will be fixed.

The best. They where not active for a full year I thought they had been abandoned but glad they aren’t. This is the best podcast app on iOS and I will always support the team with premium if they continue their great work on the app.

The ultimate power user podcast player. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I’m subscribed to a lot of podcast feeds. I don’t want to listen to every episode of every podcast. Castro makes this easy. I don’t want to listen to every chapter of every podcast (especially longer ones) Castro makes it easy for me to do this. Castro is the most feature complete podcast player on the market. I love Overcast, and Pocketcasts is good too, but Castro has more useful features and the design is gorgeous. Great work SuperTop!

Great simplicity, reasonable dues, needs full text search. I like the app a lot, and have subscribed. Like that I can subscribe to a RSS feed / URL. For full discovery, I would prefer to use full text search of at least the metadata, if not the contents of the podcast. Have to rely on several apps for coverage.

This does everything without fuss. I’m finally going back to Castro from Overcast. - It’s simpler yet has every feature I need, - There’s an easily accessed History, - there’s a clear list of all my subscribed podcasts.

Everything you want and more. Compared around 10 recommended apps - Castro stood out as efficient, no-fuss and intuitive to use, including the ability to set many small features personally including playback speed and trim silence. Range of programmes is awesome. The clincher was the Sideloads feature to keep track of favourite Audios from non-podcast sources, & love that queries have been responded to quickly. Keep it up guys!

So much better than Apple Podcasts!!. This app UI is built for regular and occasional listening alike. Organisational settings of queue management and inbox are so good! I can’t recommend this app enough!! Love love love

Incredible app. I can’t believe how much better this is compared to the standard Apple app. It just works!

Loving it!. I've been using Castro for about one week and can't see myself going back to my old apps stitcher or overcast. The things I've quickly grown to love be are; · Queue feature with easy ordering and download queued audio when in Wi-Fi range · Inbox with all new episodes which can either be archived our moved to queue list · Star feature to tag episodes I really enjoyed making it easy to find then later And still finding useful features, worth the money for podcast lovers.

Does it all!. Great at backing up, my new phone, new 14.2, then do to Apple ID issue I had to delete the app and threw all that I don't think it lost my place in the podcast I was hearing, my que was see definitely unaffected. There's importing and exporting which it does so well. The Perks of the plus are skipping intros as you decide, each cast has it own settings for silence skipping, voice enhance, playback speed etc. Works with Patreon RSS feeds as well

One way to make it 10 times better. I love the app, but as an avid listener of many different types of podcasts for different reasons and times of day, what would be amazing would be to have 3 different playlists I could organise independently. For instance I have a range of podcasts I listen to when I'm going to sleep at night. I'd like to be able to keep them in their own seperate playlist as I go through them slowly. I also listen to news based podcasts that I like to listen to as soon as they come in. If I had a different playlist they dropped into it would make it a lot easier to stay on top of things.

Where have you been all my life?. This is the podcast app I’ve been searching for. Finally an easy to manage queue and playlist. Been using it a couple months now (free version) and no complaints at all.

The best podcast player. I have used this for years, and it’s the most reliable podcast player, even when subscribed to heaps of podcasts. The queuing system is almost the perfect UI for podcast management.

Finally a good podcast app. Love the way queuing episodes removes the clutter so I can listen to only what interests me. Also love the seamless tie up with Apple Watch and CarPlay. Only thing missing is a desktop app (or website) so I can pick up where I’ve left off on all devices. Besides that - love it.

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Used to be great. Castro had been my go to app for podcast. However, for the past year as a premium subscriber, I have submitted multiple crash reports including reports of CarPlay problems. and never heard back from the support team.

Stopped working. No longer download’s podcasts, so bye!

dead app. this app has been inactive yet it still charges a subscription for most features. been a user since day one even before the app relaunch. sad to see the state of it.

Unplayable. None of the podcasts play after recent update

Not performant on old phones. This might be a great app if you have a very new iPhone. On older iPhones, Castro freezes for 10 - 45 seconds after most simple actions (pressing the play button, rearranging a podcast, pausing, switching tabs, most actions). I used to believe this delay is caused by local buffering, but I now believe the developers are novice programmers who don’t understand how to deal with lists lazily, or handle dispatch queues. Either way, this is not a pleasant podcast player if you’re on an old iPhone. This is the last review I’ll write. I’m uninstalling Castro now.

Can we organize a takeover of this app. This app has the greatest design I’ve seen of any podcasting app out there but the reliability sucks. Is there anyone else like me that would even welcome some team at Apple to just rip off this design but actually make it work for more than a month straight - something happened with this company over the past year and I’m going to point the finger of blame at whatever or whoever that change was as this app just infuriates me now to no end and yet I love the beauty of the concept. I feel like I’m in an abusive relationship with this app.

They curled up and died.. This has been my favorite podcast app for 5+ years. Their server is down and communication is ambiguous. The end is here. So long, friend.

Still salty about the bait and switch. I paid for the app at first, then they turned it into a subscription model. Yucky!!

Fix the bug. Skipping bug is so annoying! Deleted the app and switched to Overcast. Please improve your product first if you want users to pay.

Best podcast player, but…. This is my favourite podcast player. By far. All features are great especially the ease to organize play order and playback control. The only issue has been the problems they’ve run into recently and am noticing that most new podcasts are arriving later and later. I hope they stick around.

Best podcast app around. They have had some serious problems with their servers recently but apparently they’ve just been bought out and improvements are on the way. I hope so. I tried all the other podcast apps and none of them work as well as Castro. With other apps I feel like I’m drowning in the UI just to play an episode. Castro is clean and direct and easy to use. Hope the new owners don’t mess too much with it but focus instead on improving the backend.

Fails to connect. Cannot update any podcasts for three days now. No communication from the Dev. Overcast it is.

Best podcast app for me, but…. I use Castro now for years and for me it is the best one out there because of its inbox queuing system. This is the best format for me to consume the podcasts I want to hear regularly and keep the rest just in the inbox. The recent update 2023.1 was a great overhaul introducing nice features to keep track of not listened episodes. The support (email through the app) when I used it is also good and responsive and I hope it still is. Now the to the “But”: Castro needs a connection to their servers to be able to download podcasts. If Castro’s servers are down you are stuck and this happened on a few occasions. This tbh is unacceptable as every podcast is hosted anyways on different servers. I regard this decision as a very bad one unless there is a good reason to do this other than monitoring or grabbing statistics. Still this isn’t enough for me to move to a different app because as I already said Castro functions exactly like my brain is wired.

Love the UI&UX, but missing features. This is the best podcast player I’ve used—feature-rich, very customisable, easy to use, and looks great. The subscription prices are also reasonable (the annual subscription is at the max. end of reasonable). I switched from Overcast because Castro has Overcast’s two best features (Voice Boost, and Smart Speed), AND a superior UX that is actually intuitive. However, after a few months with Castro, I’m returning to Overcast because Castro is missing some important features I really need: -“Mark as played” function on episodes -Playlists: so we can create curated collections of episodes If Castro would at least have playlists, I’d come back to it in a heartbeat.

weird. stopped working?? like completely

Best podcast player. Castro wasn’t working for me for a while so I tried a few others, mostly the Apple podcast app and nothing compares to Castro. I love the ease of being able to organize your Podcasts. You can choose exactly what you want to hear next and organize it easily and simply. I hope this podcast player sticks around

Create playlists not possible. I just want the simple feature of creating separate playlists of podcasts and this is not possible in this app.

Thanks for ruining the user experience. This was a great free podcast app. Completely met all my needs without having to opt-in to the paid Plus version. But it was of course too good to last. With this update came “promoted content” aka ads. Naturally I can only opt out of the ads by paying. No way, no how - I'll be looking elsewhere for my podcasts if this new “feature” persists.

I already paid for ad free.. I bought this app, thinking that it would be a good ad free service. Now, since the release of Castro plus, I guess the older users need to pay to upgrade to continue to receive a service that they already bought. Looking for another app, considering.

Great app except it doesn’t work. I’ve used this app for years but now it won’t download episodes of my favourite podcast. It throws an error “‘episode name here’ failed to download. Cannot parse response. “ the support page from the developer is useless. I have no way to report this error to get it fixed and yet I’ve paid good money for this now useless app. Not ok!

If I can't import, I'm not going to use it. You put direct import from Overcast behind your premium paywall. Dumb. Then your "copy to Castro" feature to import an OPML file limits to only importing 100 podcasts. Well, that's a good way to deter a heavy podcast user from even considering your app.

Watch OS issues. I loved the app until it started glitching on WatchOS. No matter what podcast episode I pick, in only plays one. It shows it is playing whatever I pick but only plays one. I have contacted them and they said it was going to be fixed months ago. I have given up waiting and cancelled my subscription. Going to another app.

Not authenticated error. Why?. I am on a cruise ship and just paid for expensive internet. Now I get not authenticated error. Why? Sucks!

Great podcast app. I have been using Castro for years. It does everything I want. Easy and straightforward.

This thing just works. Love it. So easy to organize a playlist. So easy to manage my feed so worth whatever it costs.

My favourite podcast app. Apple's Podcast app is severely lacking in features. Then there are other apps that promise everything and the kitchen sink. Castro is pretty great for what I need: easy organization and easy playback speed controls. To top that off, the UI is fantastic. One issue that I frequently encounter though is that some shows just don’t update. So sometimes I’ll want to listen to a new show I discovered and I see that the only episodes listed in Castro are from many months ago and it just refuses to pull the latest stuff.

Bad Dev. Dev is rude and will not take any type of questions. Horrible experience, and a bad app.

Latest Update. They ruined the app. Update is terrible. Don’t download unless they revert back to what made the app great. Simplicity

Misuse of subscriptions model. There should be some kind of rule around app charging subscription and not keep their app up to date. This developer don’t care to update or improve their app for almost year and enjoying a free money. It keep crashing... Secondly no chromecast support Lastly I already paid full price for the app and suddenly start charging another monthly fees and locking down everything which matters if not paid is kind a tech burglary when most of the podcast app is free.

Buggy and bad sync. There's a lot of things to like about the Castro app on iPhone including plenty of flexibility and a decent interface. The problem is unreliability. The Apple Watch app is incredibly buggy, will cut in and out, switching from one episode to another at random, deleting epsiodes a few seconds after they start . . . etc. I've e-mailed the developer a couple of times and gotten a pretty blasé response saying he knows it's buggy. That would be fine for an app in beta, but not one with a paid subscription. I'm switching back to a different app for now.

App no longer downloads podcasts. For the last few days, the app no longer downloads new episodes giving a timeout error. I can only assume the app uses its own server to collate episodes as a proxy, and this sever has gone down. So far no response from the developer. I’m. It even able to export my podcasts to switch to a different app.

devi’s rude. Dev only wants to take your money, and dump you. DO NOT PURCHASE. No support, no help, and rude customer communication. Unbelievable. Not to mention the app is more expensive than their superior competitors.

Guess it’s dead now. Shame because this was my go-to for years.

This is one of the most poorly developed applications I’ve ever paid for. It’s really staggering how they took such a simple thing like a medium player and made it the most resource piggish thing possible. This app is constantly calling out to the Internet using data downloading things like thumbnails constantly. It crashes constantly no matter how long you’re on Wi-Fi you’ll never have all of your shows downloaded. The free apps of every version of everything else I’ve used is better than this. Wish I had tried before I buy.

This is THE podcast app. I love this app and have used it for years. Only issue is sometimes some content isn’t available in the app but can be found on apple’s podcast app. That being said, in still give it a top rating

So many little issues. I can’t express my frustration enough. Over all the app is very buggy, it will constantly freeze requiring you to close and open again. God forbid you have a timer going, app with pause podcast then lose your listening position. I have been using this app for serval years and it has become worse and worse over time. I have finally moved back over to the overcast app. Way better app. Overcast actually has a way better privacy policy and explanation as well.

Dead App. Development seems dead. It’s too bad - has the best UI design and workflow of all the apps out there.

Works Well - Is the App still active?. Castro has a lot of great features. Chapter pre-selection, trim silence, share clips, enhance voices…it all works really well. The triage system makes sorting though podcasts easy. The watch sync can be a bit unreliable, and they’ve acknowledged the watch app is basically a buggy mess until further notice, so if that’s why you’re getting this app, look elsewhere. Update: they are virtually silent on twitter and there have been no app updates for months. Have to think they’re out of business or very close. I won’t subscribe again until they come back to life a bit. Update October 2022 - been months since an update. Abandonware.

Excellent podcast app. Simple and effective.

no ipad support. on ipad, there’s just a small sideways screen. :-(

Love Hate. I love it so much except it stops working 75% of the time… interface is perfect and I am finally switching off Castro bc nothing will load.

NO VIDEO SUPPORT!. Didn’t even say this is App Store. Waist of my money.

excellent app when it’s working 🙄. app is not working again… this is exhausting, i’m paying a subscription and every two weeks something is broken

Sad to see the state of the app. Been a user since Castro 1. It was the best podcast app on the App Store. Unfortunately I’ve finally made the choice to cancel my subscription after moving my podcasts over to Overcast. Despite Overcast being harder to use, it’s being actively developed and improved on unlike Castro which was abandoned for over a year. It’s reliable and doesn’t have the server downtime that Castro frequently suffers from. Since supertop sold the app to Tiny, the experience hasn’t been where it needs to be and an unnecessary UI update isn’t going to fix that. Maybe I’ll come back and see how it is in the distant future.

used to be good. the decline has been steady for what feel like a year and Overcast has been an easy transition this past month

Good but needs better search options. Love the layout of things and that there is a listening history. It seems I can’t use the discovery section to search for individual episodes. I often look for a summary of a topic I am interested in but don’t need an ongoing podcast show to dive into. Also will search for interviews with authors, public figures and experts in a field this way. Also I can’t find many shows I have listened to on other podcast players. I am able to put them in manually which is ok but wonder what other gems get no play here.

Great functionality, despicable bloat. Loved the functionality of this app but cannot understand the insane data bloat it has become. I have 4 episodes queued. I realize that episodes are stored locally to make playback faster. So why does the app take up 27GB of my very precious iPhone storage? Have done a ton of research and can’t find answers so I am uninstalling and switching to any other app with favourable reviews. Hate that I’m forced to this but apps are uninstalling on their own to make room for Castro. The idea that I would want to pay for this app even if it fixed this issue is ludicrous. Have spent a ton of time with Castro and I’m sad it’s come to this. Peace out devs.

Seminal. This is one of the few apps that I have had for years. Simple, elegantly designed, awesome UI.

Great app, just one bug. The app is really great. Been using it since before acquisition. However, there is a bug: the app doesn’t delete a downloaded episode once it is listened. This means the app occupies a lot of memory over time, and eventually you need to delete and re-install it (don’t forget to backup before deleting). Would really appreciate a bug fix. Thanks.

Great UI but there are quirks. My main complaint is that I have some lesser known podcasts that never update automatically. I have to manually refresh them in the app which is weird. Otherwise the queueing UI is my favourite. I thought this was abandonware for a period but glad to see it’s gotten an update recently. Seems to have fixed some other minor bugs.

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Nickel and dimming for incredibly basic features. The inbox and queue functionality that form the basis of this app are really cool, but if yiu don't py for the subscription, the player and every other feature is *garbage*. I'm all for the developers trying to make money, and I'd have happily paid up front for the app, even if it had some features behind a subscription still. But putting the setting for *how many episodes to keep* behind a subscription?! Yes. You have to subscribe to set a maximum # of episodes per show to keep. A feature that has been basic since the dawn of podcasts. It's crummy enough that most other apps basic features, like trimming silence, are subscription only, but there's some stuff I'd pay for, if only to support the devs and because the inbox is great. But that kills it for me. I can't in good conscious give money for this on a yearly basis. I'd pay 15 bucks up front for it, but putting the episode limit under the subscription? No. That's too far. That's freaking horse armor. Have you literally zero shame? You should be embarrassed, I'm sorry. One star for the wretchedly implemented monetization strategy, and one because the inbox is dope.

Great customization, accessible with VoiceOver, but problems with feeds. I appreciate the high flexibility of settings for each individual podcast. however, not all podcasts are available via Castro, and there seems to be some bucks that affect the queuing of episodes to which I am subscribed. some episodes always appear twice. The arrival of others is delayed compared to other podcast clients. Also, the app is very accessible with VoiceOver, at least through IOS 15.7. However, I understand that podcast from the highly accessible podcast service Pinecast are not available on Castro in IOS 16. Unless these issues are resolved by the time my subscription is up for renewal, I will probably not renew.

It'd be perfect if it weren't so glitchy. I'm using Castro on an iPhone 6 running iOS 12 (though the issues date back to well before iOS 13 was released). Launching the app or switching tabs or rearranging episodes in my queue takes upwards of five seconds at a time. CarPlay is buggy — I often have to tap play, then pause, then play again to coax the app to play in the car, several times per session; sometimes it just won't show my queue or inbox. I use the app all day long, so the glitches really add up and leave me frustrated. I'd have switched long ago, except Castro is designed *perfectly* for the way I want to manage and play podcasts. Sad to say I'm looking for a new podcast player now.

Great user experience. Awesome app in the way it lets you easily move episodes to your que from inbox, especially when you are wanting to download at home on WiFi for when you are out and about to save on your cellular data usage. Also very easy to individualize each podcast. For instance I know there are three or four podcasts that I listen to every episode regardless of the title. I easily individualized these to download and go to my que automatically. The rest are all very easy to skim over and either add to que at top or add to que at bottom or delete. The most user friendly podcast app I have used yet. So much so I immediately paid for a year to help support them.

Update: Back from 2 stars to 5 stars!. As an early adopter and supporter of Castro, I was annoyed to the point of changing my early 5 star review to a 2 star review when I began seeing ads during my Castro experience, that were all too easy to accidentally open with a brush of my thumb when scrolling. I was livid. Looks like Team Castro squashed this massive annoyance in their latest update, and I couldn’t be happier! I’m right back to the app that makes my dog-walking and car-driving truly entertaining experiences! (Bonus points for being part of the Apple CarPlay experience!)

Beautiful app, but needs to grow.. I love the look of this app and it seems like it could be the perfect Pocket Casts replacement for me following their new pricing structure. The problem is it doesn’t support filters / playlists, so you can’t group say “sports” related podcast together (or whatever you would like to keep in a separate folder). Another aspect that could be improved is the bottom navigation bar. I get that it is nice to have the now playing view always accessible, but having two rows of icons at the bottom causes clutter and takes away from the simplicity. Moving a triangle play logo up into the main rack and having that take you to the now playing screen would solve this. There is also a bug causing a static white bar to appear across the top of the screen when in library view, which gets a bit annoying after a while. Overall, this app has a TON of potential to become many people’s go to podcast app. I just feel like the changes above could help round everything out and get it to perfection. Until then (especially considering how important filters / playlists are) I will have to stick with Pocket Casts.

Update issues. I really like Castro it is user friendly and simple. I love being able to sort podcasts in the order I want to listen to them as well as having options when it comes to downloads. It also works well with the Apple Watch. The thing that keeps me from using Castro as my go to podcast player are issues around updates. Updates seems to be processed faster on other apps. When updates are posted sometimes there are duplicate podcasts. Also at times the inbox is flooded with podcasts from several days back. While I am a subscriber I am not using Castro at this time due to these issues. Hopefully an update will resolve these issues.

Amazing podcast!. So I’ve always been on Apples podcast app and didn’t mind it at first, but after being flooded with so many episodes on my favorite podcasts...I needed an app that can keep my favorites in a queue. So that I don’t have to keep jumping from one podcast to the next even when driving especially! After trying Castro Podcast app for a day, I loved it. Heck I even signed up for the week trial to enhance my podcast experience! Also, what’s a plus about this is that it supports Apple Watch! Now I do have one request that can be implemented in a future update...if you guys can let the watch control the volume that would be awesome!! Thanks again!

Castro encourages good podcast management. I came over from Overcast, where I constantly had episodes piling up, using up way too much of my storage space. Castro forces me to go through my subscribed podcasts in my inbox, consider whether or not I'm interested, and the best end up in my queue (where items are downloaded up to a certain amount of time, rather than an arbitrary or undefined number of episodes, keeping storage use predictable). Everything else is always available in the archives, ready to stream but not downloaded. It's a little more regular time investment in managing podcasts, but pays off with a constant overview of the good episodes I have to look forward to.

Can’t live without it.. It’s honestly been years since I’ve written an app review, but I cannot recommend Castro more. It’s one of my most used apps and makes managing the podcasts that I listen to a breeze. I love the History feature to keep track of all of the podcasts that I have listened to. I use the free version but I am going to upgrade to the premium version for the pure fact that I want to support the developers of this amazing app. One feature I would love to see is an end of year review similar to other content-streaming platforms out there. It would be cool to know how much time I spent listening to all of my favorite podcasts!

Only one day in and I’m sold 🌟. This app is infinitely superior to the native Apple Podcasts app. Episode management is a breeze, the queue system is super intuitive and quick, gestures make sense to flip between panes of the app, and the playback options are super smart! You can tell the developers are people who both *actually* listen to podcasts and are passionate about putting out a good product. The free version does everything I really need, but I have a feeling I will probably end up buying the pro version because of how slick it all is: trimming silence or intros, enhancing voice audio, podcast-specific playback speed settings. Welcome to the future of podcasts 😍

Like the inbox and playlist workflow. Treating podcasts as inbox items to be processed (archive, watch now/soon/later) is a familiar approach to me. It would be nice if the history of what podcast episodes I watched and when could be exported for quantified self purposes (and just plain "I remember an interesting bit of info but I can't recall which podcast episode of which podcast I heard it on...") Also, once you mark an episode as archived, it disappears from inbox but if you change your mind you have to try to remember/manually sift through which of 100+ podcasts that episode came from if you want to add it back to your queue.

Love inbox and queues - minor nits. It’s the second time I’m trying Castro and with the addition of concept of an inbox and a separate queue it has made it a lot easier to manage a lot of subscriptions. I can imagine this becoming my primary podcast player instead of Overcast. My only nit right now is the ease of adding things to the queue from the inbox is a multi step process. Would be nice to be able to swipe left/right to add something immediately to the queue instead of pecking about. It adds just enough friction to make the concept of inbox v queue less appealing but I’ll stick around to see if that is something that will change.

Best Podcast Platform IMO. This app is outstanding, but I have one request/suggestion: Please give us some auto-sort options to order/organize the order of the queue. For example, I would really like to sort podcasts by release date from oldest to newest. I don’t get to listen as much as I used to, but I keep adding to my queue anyway lol. It’s getting pretty unruly! But when I finally have time to catch up on my listening, I would rather listen to everything in the order it was published in, instead of listening to the most recently added episodes first (which is especially bad for sequential or story-style podcasts). Thanks for a phenomenal app!!

Best podcast app. I have tried a couple of podcast apps ( pocket casts, overcast, castbox, himalaya, google podcasts and apple podcasts) and this is by far the best of all of them, hands down!! Castro user interface is quiet simple to use, very intuitive and simplistic app design. The only downside for some of might be the $18 annual subscription fee to access some features but i feel its totally worth it. I listen to podcasts all the time and would like the episodes to be on autopilot rather than having to pickup the phone and change the podcasts after every episode manually. Castro is absolute best in this regard. Would recommend this app to any avid podcast listener.

Great, minus one big issue. This is honestly the best and easiest to use podcast app out there, from what I’ve seen. Functionality is super user friendly. However, one MAJOR issue - upwards of half the podcasts I follow do not automatically upload to the latest feed. There’s a work around where you can go into each podcast feed and manually refresh, but this is a major nuisance and needs fixing ASAP. There are just way too many podcasts that don’t upload in a timely manner. Super easy to use podcast app, except for this one significant issue. Would recommend

You’ve saved my marriage!. My husband is in his 70’s and is NOT a techie. I had him doing pretty well with the podcast app that comes with an iPhone. Then Apple updated the app. VERY bad. I researched podcast apps and after reading the CNET article, decided on Castro. When I explained it to my husband, it was my first look at your app. Not only did we both understand it the first time through, Jim told me this evening - a couple months down the road - that he’s never had one problem with it!!! This is the man who blames his phone for taking too long texting large files and flips out when an icon is substituted for a word. Thank you for your wonderful user friendly app. I’ll suggest your app to everyone I meet.

Let’s not add advertisements to an app I paid for the pro version. Seriously, I payed money for the pro version of this app years ago because it was what I wanted. Pay $5 up front and get a no bs app that does what I want it to. They have had the version of the app I got go basically stagnant in terms of new features. They keep adding stuff to the subscription model. Fine I guess, in my opinion they should at least give you the option to buy them outright or give them to the people who paid up front for free. But this is where I draw the line. Do not put ads in my paid app and then tell me I can get them to go away by giving you money. This should be against some sort of apple policy. I should be able to revert versions or something. Very greedy and scummy behavior. I will be looking for a new app.

Castro Podcast Player. Castro is a very easy to use and well designed application for those interested in managing their podcasts. Podcasts can be added easily from the search directory. Podcasts you are unaware of can be added or learned about from the main page that offers categories and suggestions on all types of podcasts. The app offers benefits for those interested in using it on their Apple Watch or in their car with Carplay. The app also has standout features such as being to add audio from anywhere on the web as well as an extensive playback functions when listening to a podcast.

Beautiful app, great podcast time manager. When I decided to give Castro a try I was skeptical of how it's workflow was different than other apps like it. The review on the Macworld podcast convinced me to try it, and now I'm a believer. I love being able to automatically put my favorites at the top of my playlist, then pick and choose from my queue when I need something new. I also love the play screen layout with its different speeds and forward/rewind controls, although I wish there was an easier way to activate it than tapping on that little control in the lower left corner of the bottom bar. Excellent app, and I'm looking forward to many hundreds of hours more listening.

Very Buggy. I decided to try Castro after many years of using Apple’s app, and a few other “well known” iOS Podcast clients. I went full Extra for the trial period and really enjoyed it for the first day or two until....the bugs. A day before my trial expires I have experienced very slow episodes downloads, lack of reliable push notifications, issues playing in CarPlay, and the final straw was mixed audio streams from other podcasts playing during a selected podcast. I know this app has been highly acclaimed and recommended, but at this time I cannot recommend it. I have been in touch with the developer regarding most of the above, but for now, I cannot use this app. I hope these bugs get sorted out quickly. If so, I would consider reinstalling.

I Love This App But.... The way I can sort and organize podcasts in Castro is unlike any other podcast app. But, there are a few bugs when it comes to playback via my car’s Bluetooth system. Occasionally, and especially after navigations prompts, playback will pause and not automatically resume. Pressing play/pause on the car’s radio, on the lock screen widget, or via a Siri Shortcut will not resume playback. The only way to fix this is to open the app itself, press pause, and then press play. It’s an incredibly frustrating bug and a dangerous one while driving. Until this bug is fixed, I am unable to use the app.

Almost the best podcast app. I love the user experience of Castro. The inbox > queue model is right on point with how I listen to 90% of my podcasts, while the library lets me listen to episodes in a more traditional format. Great design. My only disappointment with Castro is the way they update their feeds. Rather than let your phone poll podcast feeds for new episodes, they have a their own centralized servers do it instead. Because of this, you can experience hours long delays in getting a new episode, depending on the podcast you’re listening to. I often have to use a separate podcast app in this case. It’s unfortunate that Castro went with such a poor user experience when it comes to podcast feed polling, especially when the rest of the app is great.

Wonderfully Simple - Inbox Feature Is Great. Switched to this one from Overcast. This one lets me automatically download the podcasts I know I will always listen to (like in many other apps). For the other ones I subscribe to, I can either get a notification for new releases in the Castro inbox or I can have them archived with the rest of the old episodes. The thing that makes this app unlike any other is the inbox. If there are some podcasts you like, but you don’t want to listen to every episode, this app makes sifting through those much more simple. It’s a great app and well worth the cost.

Only thing missing is sync. I’m a Castro convert from Overcast for the improved queuing and CarPlay functionality. It’s a stellar app, but the only thing missing is an ability to sync podcasts between devices. Overcast does this exceptionally well, keeping track of play position and episodes between the web interface, iPad, and iPhone. If Castro adds this, it’s a slam dunk! CarPlay app does have a play button bug though that incorrectly shows the play button despite he podcast already playing. If you tap it, it correctly reverts to show the pause button, but after a little bit switches back to the play button.

Nice UI, but needs work under the hood. Castro is a very good looking app and works well most of the time. However, there are some critical bugs that pop up and can make the app nearly unusable. 1) is that the app seems to be unable to transition from streaming over WiFi to streaming over data. That means when I start an episode as I’m walking out the door of my apartment, it will stop playing when my phone switches from WiFi to data. The only remedy I’ve found is to restart the app and reload the episode. 2) is that the seek bar scales with the amount the podcast has been downloaded, even when streaming. This means that when you start streaming an episode, the entire bar at the bottoms will start by being 1-second long and increase as the podcast buffers. This means that you can’t manually skip to the middle of the show until the entire podcast loads up to that point. Serious problem when you have to restart an episode and want to find where you left off because the app didn’t save your spot, which is another frequent occurrence. Other than these issues, Castro is great and well-designed. Until such issues are fixed, however, I can’t rely on it as my default podcast client.

Fine Podcast app with some great unique features BUT iPad interface is lousy. I have been using various podcast players for years , I have read many positive reviews of Castro and decided to give it a try. I like it, it had some really nice features like the inbox and chapter support. I use my Apple Watch for workouts and I enjoy listening directly without my phone. BUT for the life of me I can not design an interface for the iPad. The iPad is a media device and a constant companion. I enjoy listening to music, audible books and the iPhone 2x interface of Castro is not just not conducive. The extra real estate we enjoy on the iPad should provide plenty opportunities for the designers. There is really no excuse for it. The subscription fee is sufficient enough to expect a separate iPad app.

Castro is the best. I have tried several other podcast launchers, and I have found my home with Castro. One of the things I was looking for was organization. Sometimes I subscribe to more podcasts than I am, realistically, capable of listening to. Castro gives me the option to organize, per podcast, what I can do with each new episode that releases. I believe this is an add-on (plus) feature, but it’s worth it. Especially since Castro continues to improve and add features regularly. Even without the added “plus” features, the UI and player control are brilliant. Highly recommend whether you are a casual or serious podcast listener.

Fantastic App, But Saving Snippets On Sideloads Is Broken. I don’t usually leave app reviews but Castro has really changed the way I interact with podcasts. I love the queue system as it allows me to easily discard episodes of podcasts, and the UI is really great. I’m a proud Castro Plus subscriber, however a message to the devs: saving snippets on sideloads doesn’t work! It actually seems to break saving snippets for regular podcasts too. Please fix this, as saving snippets for sideloads was a huge reason why I wanted to subscribe in the first place. Otherwise keep up the good work on this app! (And maybe bring us an iPad version soon 😜)

Great app but too bad will have to find something else. Overall the app is great and I’ve been a paid subscriber for couple of years, unfortunately the app is terrible dealing with episodes that can only be streamed and not downloaded. If an episode is only able to stream it will fail playing, trying to re-download every time going between Wi-Fi and cell data, and each time doing that it will reset the current playing position, rendering the listening unusable because you start from zero each time. I love the app but unfortunately will have to cancel my subscription and find something else because I can’t listen to some of my podcasts.

Nice features, inconsistent delivery of subscribed podcasts to Inbox. This podcast app has nice features that provide a better experience than the Apple Podcasts app. However, too often and with more frequency as of late, subscribed podcasts are not delivered to my Inbox. I have to search each podcast individually and manually add the most recent podcasts to my Queue. I even find myself having to go to the Apple Podcast apps to confirm that new episodes of my subscriptions are available and then manually find them and download them to my queue in Castro. Really disappointed. I enjoy this app but the unreliable availability of my subscribed podcasts in my Inbox will lead me to not continue my Castro Plus subscription when it is time for renewal.

Just short of greatness. Castro is the best podcast app I’ve ever used. The queue feature is great and useful for long periods when you’re listening and can’t get to your phone because you are driving or have to keep your phone in your desk at work. What keeps Castro from greatness is its search function. Typing in any subject yields a very limited list of podcasts. Also, the search page itself is in dire need of regular updates; the curated lists look as if they were posted one upon a time and left. There needs to be an easily accessible list of categories as well; I shouldn’t have to open Podcasts app (which is regularly updated) to see what the newest top apps are in a given category. Fix this and Castro will be an all time great iOS app.

Redesign introduced an annoying bug. I love the redesign overall. This is my favorite podcast app by far, and the new filters just made it even better! I like to listen to the back catalogue on podcasts as I discover them. Now when you scroll down in the list of episodes for a specific show and then add an episode to the queue, it auto-scrolls back to the top. This is so annoying when I want to download 10 or so episodes at a time! Please fix this ASAP. I also have a feature request: when looking at lists of episodes, please provide an option to show only unplayed episodes.

I am now addicted to podcasts. I spent a long time completely missing the point of podcasts because they were difficult to manage, it was difficult to find what I wanted and keep track of what I’d listen to but also have easy access to podcast that were important for one reason or another. I love the way I can manage my podcasts in this application, I love the speed controls, the voice boost and the custom controls for each show. (I know some of those are premium features but I don’t know which ones. It works really well with VoiceOver as well, which is a huge benefit so fas as I am concerned!

Stalls when playing podcasts. This app has such great potential. I keep coming back to try it, but always end up switching back to Overcast. The main problem is that sometimes it simply won’t play your podcast. You press the play button and this swirly animation circles around it. Sometimes your podcast never starts, other times it starts after a long delay. The problem seems worse on Bluetooth (my car) or AirPlay (my bedroom), which are the two main places I would listen. Overcast does not have this problem. I’ve also experienced a problem where it looks like it’s playing, but no sound is heard for the first minute or so. This happens on AirPlay.

Great app but too expensive. Update: what I wrote before still stands but ever since Castro was bought by Tiny, the premium features have been too expensive. Is at least $30 a year now which is a lot when most of the same functionality can be had for free in apps like Overcast. I stopped using Castro for this reason. So far so good. It really fits the way I listen to podcasts. It’s not for those who like to build multiple playlists (effectively you only have one with this app) but for everyone else it is really good. The audio quality is great, the app is efficient and stable, and the design is really good too. Intuitive, fun to use, and works really well. I have bounced around between a lot of podcast apps but I think I might have finally found what works best for me.

Head and shoulders above Apple’s Podcast app.... Absolutely love the interface. It’s so much more intuitive and easier to use than Apples’s app. I love that I can easily sort my queue and also separately view my library and pick and choose what I want to listen to. Also really like the history function—makes it easy to find something I listened to in the past. I’m overall very pleased. However. I wish there was a function to sort by episodes I haven’t heard. When I’m listening through a podcast’s archive, it gets really frustrating to scroll down through the entire catalogue to find an ep I haven’t heard yet. Please add this function.

Great app wish it was Chromecast enabled. This app is fantastic for someone with my collection of podcasts. I go through phases a lot with podcasts but I really enjoy having a diverse selection. This app caters perfectly to that. The only thing I’m missing is Chromecast. I have google homes around my house and for whatever reason Bluetooth is unreliable on them. Not a fault of the app (because it disconnects happen on other apps too) but I since it’s the main way I listen to podcasts it’s kind of a deal breaker. Still great app, will gladly play premium if they add it in the future. For now I’m using Downcasts.

This app is broken.. The recent update to a new engine has rendered this app practically unusable. Podcasts will stop playing unexpectedly, will not start back unless I hard close and reopen the app (and sometimes not even then), and lose their place, sometimes causing podcast episodes to be archived without warning. All of this even after the most recent update which purports to fix many of these very issues. I was enjoying this app because I could just start it up in the morning and it would play new podcast episodes all day with no intervention. I work someplace where I can't have my phone out of my pocket during the day at all, so an app that requires me to constantly fiddle with it to find my place in and play podcasts after they suddenly stop is no good at all. I am really sad that the devs have ruined their app.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Castro used to be in my “top 5 reasons to use iOS.” Beautiful interface, decent UX, does what I want well. But now the developer has significantly degraded the experience to the point that I have to find something else. A lot of apps have gone subscription model recently; most of them keep the user experience the same but lock new features behind the new subscription. This is the first app I’ve used that actually degraded the experience. Excessive ads everywhere in very annoying places. Cost to remove ads and go back to the experience I used to have? $20 per year. None of the other podcast apps have the experience I like from Castro, but spending that much just to get rid of the new ads is a hard pill to swallow.

Perfect podcast organizer and player, but Substack podcasts are broken. Still giving 5 stars because this is exactly how podcast apps should be organized for people who like to keep track of lots of podcasts without necessarily listening to every episode. Unfortunately Substack has been an emerging hosting solution for lots of new podcasts and the podcast feeds are formatted in a non-standard way that doesn’t seem to work in Castro, although they work in iTunes and Overcast. I can stream Substack podcasts but the downloads always fail. If Castro could implement a workaround so that downloads worked, I’d have zero complaints!

Widget bug, please, I beg you. I love this app so much but please, make the widget show 0 items in the queue when there are zero items in the queue. How hard can this be? How has it been like this for so long? When it used to work just fine? I understand you’re hard at work on a massive update, but this literally has caused me so much anxiety that I had to move the widget to my second home screen. (And if you do decide to fix this, I also have some notes about how the alignment of content in the small widget is ever so slightly off from the standard 16px of padding that Apple recommends.) It pains me so much that I had to give you a 4. Know that I did it because I care.

I want to like it but.... Castro has my favorite UI of any podcast app. I really want to use it but it has to limitations that make that impossible, and both of these problems involve the single queue design of the app. Every podcast I download must be stored in a single queue. When I download multiple podcasts to listen to at a later time, the queue gets very cluttered and it is a constant struggle to re-order the queue to hear the podcasts I want and avoid the ones I want to hear later. Septate playlists or at least a secondary storage location where I could keep downloaded podcast would fix this problem. The other problem is that when I play a podcast that is in the middle of the queue, Castro forces that episode up to the top of the queue. Several of my daily podcasts are downloaded in two or three episode installments. When I play the first installment, it jumps to the top of the queue and leaves the other installments farther down in the queue. If I want to listen to them in sequence, I have to resort to re-arranging the queue manually, which is frustrating at best, and very dangerous when I'm driving. Hopefully there will be an update that addresses the issues so I can actually use the app. It has a fantastic UI that I hope someday I will be able to enjoy.

I want this to be my new go-to podcast app, but.... This app is 90% of the way there to being the perfect podcast app, but it needs to add 2 features and fix one bug: Feature 1. The watch app needs to show the time remaining on the currently playing select. It is a *watch* app, after all. Surprised it doesn’t already have this Feature 2: I like the “add to top” and “add to bottom” of the queue feature in the inbox, but it would be nice to have these controls in the queue screen as well, for easy reordering of items once they’re already added. This feature is especially needed, because of the bug: Bug 1: reordering items in the queue from last to first (bottom to top) is a terrible experience. Dragging an item from the bottom of the list to the top is horribly jerky and it’s just difficult to move an item up past the top of what’s showing on the screen. Don’t know why it does this, going downward is definitely not as problematic. Perhaps it’s because of the fance ‘reordering’ animation when items swap places, but in any case it makes moving stuff to the front of the queue really painful (hence the request for Feature 2).

Best podcast player. This is the best podcast player by far after trying and being frustrated with several others! I’m the type that likes to subscribe to many podcast series, but I don’t listen to all episodes of all of them, only the episodes that sound most interesting. This player streamlines well the process of showing you new episodes, allowing you to easily choose which to download for offline listening, and automatically putting only downloaded episodes on your playlist. You can easily move around the order that downloaded ones will play. Love it!

My favorite podcast app by far!. There are a as lot of really solid podcast apps out there for iPhone and I’ve tried them all but I always come back to Castro. The interface is beautiful and easy to navigate and the app has every feature I need. My favorite features though are sideload and the inbox. Being able to add my own content to the app is just amazing and the ability to triage all new episodes to only download the ones I want was a game changer for me when first using Castro. I happily paid for the plus subscription bc the dev has proven time and time again that he is dedicated to this app and improving it.

Love the triage approach; watch app needs more work. I’m a big fan of Castro’s approach to a single podcast queue. It’s a great way to prioritize listening. The watch app, however, is a bit of a disaster. Getting episodes onto the watch is painfully slow (like 30 minutes per episode) and you have to leave the phone app in the foreground the whole time. Background syncing would be better, but it rarely works for me. Worst of all, there are serious bugs in syncing of play position. Episodes that I’ve never listened to start out 20 minutes in on the watch, and skipping back 15 seconds at a time on the tiny watch screen is more than tedious. Episodes that I listen to on the watch are never deleted on the phone. And so on.

Great queueing system, but would benefit from better swiping mechanics. This is my favorite a Podcast app, and I have tried quite a few. Its queuing system helps me stay on top of the flood of new episodes that come every week, and it looks nice. However I suggest the developer(s) look at the latest email applications for some UI inspiration. I would like it if I could just swipe left or right on an episode’s list item to queue or archive it, just like apps like Airmail let me swipe on an email to snooze, archive, and more. Save us a few taps :) Furthermore, I think the decision to make the user swipe up and down at the top or bottom of the screen to switch between the episode view and the queue view is a bad choice. Those regions are already dedicated to existing system-wide UI (notifications, control center, and the home swipe for iPhone X and above). Consequently, I frequently misfire these other actions while using Castro. Overall though I really love this app. It looks great and does what I want it to do.

Five Star App Ruined by Price Hike. Castro is a great app for listening to podcasts. Castro Plus was a worthwhile upgrade when it cost $8.99/year. For a buck more, Overcast gets you an iPad app, better Apple Watch support, and a web-based player for Mac listening. But still... I paid the $8.99 for Castro Plus and planned on watching development to help decide which app to keep. But seeing that Castro Plus is now nearly 20 bucks a year for less features than an app costing less half as much makes the decision a no-brainer. Good luck with Castro, guys. I won’t be renewing my Plus subscription when it expires, but I hope your price hike has something to do with twice as much app coming at some point in the future and not just a greedy money grab.

No Communist dictators here.. As a child of 1950s America, I found the name of this software off-putting, but I was delighted to find a superb tool for making the most of my time listening to podcasts. I haven’t noticed any censorship, and I use it every day. The selection of podcasts old and new is huge and growing. The platform is simple enough to operate, even by us technologically-challenged elders. They keep adding and refining features. Best of all, IT JUST WORKS. Glitches are rare. Thank you for an honest product at a good value. A triumph of free enterprise. Apple, move over.