Overcast App Reviews

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The Best Podcast Player. Edit: The best just got better. Finally added a playlist for favorited/starred episodes. Adding more personalization choices was a bonus. I have had Overcast for a while and think it is the best podcast player on the market. The options available for creating custom playlists are what puts Overcast at the top of the list. The ability to include or exclude podcasts or just episodes of a podcast and being able to set priority podcasts are great options I didn’t know I needed. I definitely recommend Overcast to friends and family every chance I get. Once in a while I will try other podcasts apps but quickly come right back to Overcast. Other podcast players either don’t have the same features as Overcast or don’t do them as as well. Overcast’s smart speed and speed boost seem to work much better than the same features on other podcast apps. The only complaint I have is the handling of favorited episodes. When you tap the star button on an episode it will mark it but that is it. You still have to search through the entire catalog of a podcast to find that episode. I would like to see a category or playlist that favorited episodes automatically goes to.

Much better than Apple Podcasts. I used Apple’s podcast app religiously through several updates and switched to Overcast a few years ago. Apple finally got to the point where I could barely find the pods I was subscribed to - due to the entire app being geared around recommendations of what they are promoting. No thanks. I’m sure it’s gotten worse but I haven’t looked back. Overcast is the app you want in order to curate your own selections and design your own playlists by category or whatever you choose. Very customizable and the whole thing is geared around your subscriptions. The app has all the nice features for navigating, organizing playlists, searching, customizing your download preferences, playback speeds, sleep timers. There’s nothing else I would need other than possibly the ability to customize notifications per individual podcast. Took me awhile to finally start using the smart playlists feature but once I did - it was a game changer. Highly recommend setting up playlist categories using multiple smart playlists and combined with your episode retention settings - you no longer have to spend any time setting up a queue again. You can still do it for custom listening sessions or one-offs, but if you have a lot of subs or like to bounce around based on your mood, it’s an excellent feature.

My Favorite App for Podcast. I really enjoy the simplicity of Overcast, and if you’re particular like me you’ll find all sorts of “Nitpicky” functions to fine tune the app to your liking. Visually Overcast is my favorite as well. You can set several different “themes” and it’ll use “black” when you’re iPhone is in Dark Mode which mine always is. It’s just so much better on your eyes at night when trying to relax. Making playlists is a breeze as well. My only gripe is if you have a really old episode in between two newer episodes it’ll skip the older and the play the newest first. That’s sort of odd because they have a button that you can toggle on/off for that very feature. However mine is turned off but it still plays newer episodes first. As far as grievances go that’s pretty tame. The ads are also super discreet and I hardly notice them. Lastly, I haven’t found a podcast that isn’t on Overcast. Their catalog is quite extensive. Well, what are you waiting for? Install it already!

I was sure this was THE one. I’ve been seeking an all-encompassing podcast app for a while; one with all of the functionality I need to keep my podcasts organized. I was sure this was it. I downloaded and got to organizing: I made playlists for podcasts that I only listen to select episodes (Armchair Expert, Joe Rogan) and subscribed to ones that needed to be listened to in order i.e. true crime content. I finished my Rogan playlist (after selecting close to 30 episodes) and navigated away to create one for Armchair. When I went back into the Rogan playlist, all but 2 episodes disappeared. I tried again and had the same result. Went into my Armchair playlist and, sure enough, the same thing happened. I tested it out with a couple of new playlists - still the same result. Either I’m not understanding the functionality of Overcast’s regular playlist feature or I’ve fallen upon a massive bug. I reached out to the developer via Twitter - both the Overcast Twitter and his personal - but haven’t heard back. Pretty frustrated that I spent $9.99 on a premium version of this app for a main feature not to work. Will update if I can get some answers.

Once Great, but Desparately Needs Help!. Update: Upon further review, this app will no longer download episodes via wi-fi AT ALL! Set it to wi-fi only, turn off cellular data, and it’s completely useless! So, if you want to use Overcast much, you better have an unlimited data plan. In addition to this, the developer offers ZERO technical support; he even tells you this in the app info like we’re supposed to feel sorry him. Well, I feel sorry for folks stuck with a podcast app that won’t download podcasts! Someone needs to fix this festering pile of poo for me to continue using it. Original Review: I’ve used Overcast for years and absolutely loved it, until recently. This app has a major issue with episodes getting stuck in “waiting to download.” They won’t download until you actually play them, and if you aren’t on wi-fi at that time, tough - just smoke right through your cellular data plan. I’ve tried everything I can imagine to fix it, and nothing works. This issue has been cropping up for YEARS now, and the developer hasn’t addressed it. It’s too bad, because it is a great app, otherwise. But, this is a dealbreaker - especially if you listen to a lot of podcasts, as I do.

My Favorite Podcast Player Just Got Better. I’ve used this update for a few days now. I’m super happy with it. The button-ification of the playlists, even though I only have one at the moment, is a welcome change. The old style made them kind of just blend into the interface. Now it’s got customizable colors and symbols to customize. Will be playing with that. Next down, there is a very welcome horizontal row of recently played episodes. Thing I didn’t know I needed 1 of 2. I’ve used that to continue playing several times already. Below that, is the familiar list of all subscribed podcasts. It used to be subscriptions with unplayed episodes at the top and subscriptions without below. Now, thing I didn’t know I needed 2 of 2, there are 3 buttons that filter the podcasts between those two groups I just mentioned, but also adds a list of inactive podcasts. Now I can easily cull my subscriptions, something I didn’t even consider doing before. Amazing update! Always exciting to get new look.

Smart Speed For The Win. There are so many good podcasts out there, and so many podcast apps to download into your smartphone to listen to your favorite ones. All these podcast apps, including Apple “iOS” Podcast have in common features that make them somehow similar to each other. Yet, what makes Overcast stand above the rest, is it has a technology that I haven’t seen in others, and it's called Smart Speed which shortens the silence in thought long podcast, I know all the apps give you a control to speed up your podcast if you are in a car and don’t have enough time, while you don’t want to miss any of the speech, I know this depends on everyone preference and the type of show you listening to. But we all know speeding up your podcast it take from the enjoyment.l, that’s way overcast has the technology that doesn’t trade off the enjoyment yet also save sometime. I recommend it big time. All I wish for is a new feature that allows the podcast rewind a 5 seconds back when ever a notification goes off while you are listening to one.

My only gripe.... First off, this is an essential app for me and in my opinion it’s as good as it gets as far as podcast players goes. It will always hold a prominent space on my first home screen page and if I were not such a creature of habit, tied down by muscle memory, it would replace Apple Music in my dock. I almost feel guilty for commenting a suggestion, because it’s so basic that surely it’s a problem that can’t be solved otherwise Marco would have fixed it by now but alas, here goes...The single annoyance I have is with the search. Let’s say I want to hear an older episode of the Joe Rogan Experience with Joey Diaz as a guest. I type Joey Diaz into the search bar and boom 12 results appear. If I click one to add to my queue but want to go back to add another episode, I have to retype my original search query and start over basically. I don’t know how or if this can be remedied but it would make my Overcast experience that much more enjoyable. Again, this is an amazing app, the best of the best, and thank you for all your hard work!

The intelligent speed boost alone makes it the best.. There are no perfect podcast apps yet, but for years no one has copies overcasts gap skip and pitch safe speed boost. It is done so well i dont notice, and even at 1.1 or 1.2 you save a lot of time and get to listen to more. All the important things are here - playlists and smart sorting, adjustable skip and back time, a simple useable interface. Big thank you to a thoughtful overcast team, and thank you for getting this review without interrupting and asking for it. This is is 6 Star app, but i am satisfied with five because there is room to grow - notably there needs to be a place to see all your star favorites. The only other app that has something on this is apple podcast because it looks nicer and their new deep content search engine is the best podcast discovery method since word of mouth. But how many new podcasts can you handle? So discover them however and manage your daily subscriptions and library in overcast.

Continuous Play? - UPDATED. EDIT - still couldn’t get Apple Podcast to work so I stuck with this awhile. I found out where continuous play is, and you have to add episodes to allow them to play or something? Still believe the app is not intuitive, and could really benefit from a touch-screen walkthrough when first installed and opened. It’s kind of ridiculous that this doesn’t already exist, given the amount of features this app seems to have. Robust application with some good features, but those features are lost to users without some kind of explainer. Original: I’m playing catch-up on a podcast I just started listening to that has been around for two years, so there is a lot of content to get through. I used to listen to it on Apple Podcasts, but for whatever reason that app has stopped working on my phone, and after looking at reviews for Overwatch I thought I’d give this a try. If Continuous Play exists, it’s not intuitive, nor does the app seem to have a feature where it will automatically pick up where the listener left off in a show. As soon as I downloaded the app I went to Settings and toggled ‘Continuous Play’ on, but it isn’t doing anything. I’ve tried playing the podcast from the episodes pages, creating playlists (the Smart Playlist is a joke), nothing works. The app just stops after it plays whatever episode your selected. Will be troubleshooting the issues with Apple Podcast and deleting this app immediately.

One Of A Kind?. This is the first and only podcast app I've seen with compression. At least, that's my interpretation of what "Voice Boost" is doing. My mind is blown by how few entities are even attempting to address this elephant in the room. Some of the best and top podcasters fail to produce listenable audio. It is extremely simple. You need to cut your lows and brick your waveform. To do that right you start with a hot preamp (with low cut enabled) into a limiter or compressor so that you always peak at a consistent level, whether you talk, yell, or whisper into the mic (looking at you, Bobby Lee). If I remember correctly, -0.1 db is the highest you can go without causing it to clip when converting to mp3. That's where you set your overall limiting level when exporting the final master. If you didn't do the first part right, that's how you fix your final product. Just boost your levels into a limiter until the dynamic range is gone, exactly what the audiophiles hate. Ten+ years in, much of the podcast world is still figuring out the basics, but I continue to love you more than a friend. This app, iPhone's built-in dynamic range compression, and the analog compressor on my TV signal chain help keep this relationship strong.

I’ve never looked back. I was very early in getting into podcasts. Actually used Stitcher before iPhone added their default app. Don’t even know how many years I’ve used Overcast now rather than the standard iPhone podcasts app but just about everything is just a little better here. Also, so many little things that don’t exist on the standard iOS app (as far as I know). Won’t list them all here but by far my favorite feature that comes to mind is the customization you can put in for number of old episodes to hold on to from each individual podcast to keep your feed clean and not eat up too much storage on shows you don’t get to as often and probably won’t anyway! Can’t tell you how excited I was when they added offline syncing ability for podcasts to the Apple Watch app so I could listen on runs without my phone. Also, I was so pleasantly surprised to see how quickly they fixed some of the early bugs with this feature that were obnoxious. Keep up the great work Overcast I recommend your product to everyone when it comes up and even tell them how easy it is to transfer over from another app.

Doesn’t connect to Internet.. This morning I paid for premium subscription. Later the same day when checking for my daily dose of recently downloaded podcasts, there were none?! When checking podcast history or trying to leave feedback within app, I kept getting the message “No Internet Connection - the Internet connection connection appears to be offline.” My phones other apps (social media, safari, mail, etc.) are using WiFi just fine. I checked to make sure both WiFi and cellular data are checked. I cancelled my subscription to see if that was the problem. Doesn’t seem to have made a difference. I turned phone off and then on - that didn’t solve the problem. I hate to have to shop around for a different podcast player. Can anyone help me? UPDATE: Upgraded rating from one star because my podcasts started downloading again! I am happy about that. Thanks fixer! I had preferred this player to others I have tried (I like to create multiple playlists.) and am glad I don’t need to change. However, I am waiting to see if the download issue arises again before re-paying for my cancelled premium subscription.

simple and clean. came here after the last iOS update broke apple podcasts, like so many others. overcast is simple and has a nice clean easy to use interface, which is all I want. I love that the sleep timer can be adjusted to whatever time I want. love how easy it is to find and download the podcasts and episodes I want, especially since I’m almost never caught up on podcasts and so usually the most recent episode isn’t relevant to me. my two complaints are: - i wish the sleep timer counted down the minutes the podcast is playing, instead of just the real-time minutes that go by - I wish it was easier to save episodes to come back to, because occasionally there are episodes I want to refer back to for school and such. In apple podcasts there was a “saved episodes” folder, which was handy because it was out of the main feed for that podcast but was easy to find. I’ve tried staring episodes to refer back to on Overcast, but they stay in the main “unplaced” feed for that podcast and are irritating to have to scroll past to get to the actual unplaced episodes.

The BEST, especially if you care about sound quality.. I listen to podcasts all the time, so love Overcast because it has great tools for managing playlists, makes finding podcasts easy, and seems to be built around what I actually want to do with a podcast app. The latest release has given me features I didn’t even know I wanted, like the “mark as played” which is great. (-edit: I didn’t realize at first the following was a feature already!-) I love that “mark as played” is a toggle, to easily mark things un-played for when I accidentally fall asleep listening and end up with six podcasts marked played that I have no memory of! As for sound, this is the only podcast player I’ve found that actually sounds good at anything over 1x playback speed, and the smart speed “shortens silence” setting is my favorite tiny detail. This is one of the few apps that I subscribe to, as I want to make sure they’re able to keep revising and making the experience better.

Excellent simple to use. I love the new interface. Clear, simple and intuitive. And free of any unnecessary stuff. The only issue I have is that when searching and subscribing to new podcasts, it doesn’t let you choose which smart playlist you want the new podcast to be in at the time of subscription. You have to subscribe first, then back out of the search library, go to the playlist you want and then select edit playlist and then find the podcast you recently downloaded from the long list of all podcasts I’ve joined. There should be a feature that lets you choose to send a new podcast directly to an existing or new playlist when you subscribe to it. And in the list of podcasts, each one should also say which playlist it belongs to. There have been times when I checked a podcast to the wrong playlist. Or completely forgotten to check it in a playlist and therefore never listen to it.

Pretty great!. What I love about this app is how customizable and user friendly it is. You can pick different color schemes for the apps, get super particular about what order to display shows and episodes in your feed, create playlists (the main reason I got this app and deleted the regular “Podcasts” Apple app), etc. There are so many options without it becoming overwhelming so kudos to the creators! My one gripe is that I wish the “Add Podcasts” section of the app would be updated more frequently. It seems like the suggested podcasts in the “most recommended” category or “comedy” category, or any of the other categories hardly ever change. It’s always the same list of podcasts with one or two new ones thrown in. This makes it difficult for me to find more podcasts and ultimately spend more time on the app. It would also be great to get suggestions for other podcasts that are similar to what I already listen to (ex: “if you liked x podcast, you might also like y podcast”). This app does not make easy to discover new podcasts/podcasts that are similar to the ones I already enjoy, and that’s the only way in which the Apple “podcasts” app is superior to this one.

Good default podcast app replacement.. iOS 11 iRuined the podcast app, and I needed a replacement stat. To be honest this is the first app I downloaded, and I haven’t needed to download another. The good - initial loading of my 20+ subscribed podcasts was quick and easy. Set the first playing in the playlist and it plays through until you hit stop or it runs out. I like having a running playlist of all of the current unplayed or partially played episodes, that I can quickly drag and prioritize my new dailies before my weeklies. The bad - after the initial load, I can’t seem to browse new podcasts to add. I click a category, and the app freezes. It keeps playing what I was listening to, I can double click home to get out, but it’s not loading the search. I can kill it, go back, rinse repeat - same story. I presume it’s a bug from ios11, but it’s the one showstopper for me... Feature wishes - prioritize new podcasts like the playlist; automatic subscription loading from default podcast app; a new type of discovery service - perhaps curated or within current categories - give me 5 or 10 minute chunks of the top 5 podcasts, or give me the top rated / top streamed pod? episode? from the top 5 channels within a category ... something that gives me enough to preview, but isn’t oppressive - add a subscribe now button to the GUI and I’m set; separate video podcast section to really blow through my gigs.

Finally A Platform That Let’s Me Organize. I’m so glad I found the Overcast podcast platform! I’ve tried a couple others but they never did exactly what I wanted. I listen to different styles of podcasts on different days depending on my mood and attention span. Sometimes I need hype and sometimes I just want easy listening. I can organize my saved list to set up my playlist ahead of time so that my preferred order happens without me having to snatch up the phone and change the podcast in the middle of what I am doing. A couple other perks are the vocal boosts and speed of play options. Only con I am experiencing is no matter what I do, I am not getting new episode notifications consistently. I get sporadic updates for some shows and no notifications for others. I have checked all my notification settings and everything is set like it’s supposed to be. I’m having to bounce over to Apple podcasts and check my recent uploads over there to know what I need to add to my saved list on Overcast. I hope this gets fixed soon! After that snag is fixed, this platform will be perfect!

There’s a reason this is an editor’s choice app. I have been using this app for many years now. When podcasts download, they don’t seem to take up quite as much space as with apple’s podcast app. This app has everything I want to listen to. They also present ads for other podcasts that are contextually related to what you are already listening to, and these ads appear at the very bottom of the screen. They don’t get in your way. When searching, the categories are well defined & extremely robust. You can find just about any podcast you would want. And, if you need to clear space on your device; if you delete the app & reinstall it, you can access all your podcasts again without having to restore from a backup. I’ve never had an issue with it loading. It is very consistent. I highly recommend this app.

Dump the default and get Overcast!. I have become a HUGE podcast listener. My typical day will have me in the car for 2-5 hours and podcasts have become a staple for me. Like most folks, I used the default player on my Apple devices. What a mistake that is! The default player started forcing other podcasts to download in place of my favorites. I contacted Apple who didn't give two squirts and bounced me around to numerous customer "don't care" departments. At that point I searched for a new player and found Overcast. I have been in love with it since. Great layout and fantastic functionality! Not sure about the people crying about ads ... I haven't gone subscription (yet!) but the ads are the least obtrusive I have seen on any app. I've deleted my fair share of apps for obnoxious advertising; I understand a person wants to make some money off their work and I don't fault anyone for that. The ads on here are minimal and certainly tolerable to help reward the guy for a great product.

Better than Apple Podcast app. I listen to Spanish learning podcasts as well as technology and health podcasts. I tried to get a whole separate podcast app specifically for learning Spanish so that I could keep all of my learning life separate from the completely different genres that I usually listen to, but then realized I could easily make different playlists in Overcast and switch back and forth whenever I wanted. It is VERY difficult to try to live this life in the Apple Podcast app. If I wanted to switch to Spanish podcasts, trying to get back to technology podcasts risked messing up my whole queue in the Apple Podcasts app, not to mention the Podcasts app daily forgetting where I was in my podcast and having to restart from the beginning. For my specific purposes, Overcast is awesome for me, and the kinds of things I can do and learn is literally not possible in the Apple Podcast app. Thanks Marco.

1 Billion Times Better than Apple. The native iOS podcast app used to be good. Then Apple decided to make it look and function much more like its music app when they released Apple Music, which is to say they dumped all the good interface choices out the nearest window. The native iOS podcast app is atrocious to use, isn’t responsive, can be very finicky, and just overall hates life, particularly yours. My favorite feature was that it knew that even though I was only 10 minutes or so (how would I know how long, my phone was in my pocket?) into a podcast and happened to drive through a dead zone, I definitely wanted it to mark the entire show as complete and wouldn’t want to resume where I left off when I regained signal. It knew I loved scrolling through hundreds of uploaded podcasts in the finished pile looking for the one I wasn’t done with yet, only to try to find what time stamp I was at when it cut me off. Thanks for nothing, Apple podcasts. And thank you, Overcast, for being a clean, well-designed, completely functional podcast app.

Great podcast with one VERY irritating drawback. Overcast is overall quite nice. Fantastic layout, simple but powerful features, active development. My one big gripe with it (and it is almost a deal-breaker for me) is that an episode has to be downloaded in order to be played, unless you set the app to streaming (in which case it doesn’t download anything unless told to explicitly) in addition to being a nuisance for usability, it renders the discoverability that its directory affords almost non-existent. If I am looking through the catalog and see something I think I might like, I can’t just preview an episode to see if it’s right for me. No, I have to download the episode, wait until it’s done, and then I can play it. There’s a play UI element, but it just hangs. I would love to see this fixed in a later build, because it’s something that pretty much all other podcast apps have solved. If something can be downloaded and the app is set to download it, sure, go for it, but otherwise be ok with streaming it.

Honestly, reviewing because it said in settings they would never interrupt to ask for a review. This app is the best podcast app I have used. Way better than the stock iOS podcast app and is incredibly thoughtful in its details. When you pause, it skips back a second or two so your brain can pick up where the conversation was when it resumes, and using the skip ahead buttons will adjust to land between words. It will speed up or cut out intros, and while digging through the settings I couldn’t help but notice the option in there that also informed me they wouldn’t ask for a review with a pop-up (like every other app all the time!) so it inspired me to make this review. I also noticed that with a premium subscription you can upload your own files which is perfect for listening to old radio shows I have archived but playback of a 4 hour show is nearly impossible without an app designed to handle long format talk based files, and this is going to be perfect. I didn’t realize it was an option and thought premium just took away ads. That alone isn’t worth paying for to me, but now that I saw this they are going to have a new customer.

Love the app but it keeps constantly crashing and is unusable. I absolutely love the design and aesthetics of this app and the sound quality is also top notch. The Smart Speed and Audio Boost features are also quite nifty features that I’ve come to adore. The Smart Speed has been especially useful for speeding past “dead zones” in the audio where nothing is happening and its saved me lots of time to listen to other podcasts and what’s better, the audio does not get distorted when speeding it up, unlike other podcast apps where the audio gets pitched higher or becomes robotized when ou speed it up. Unfortunately though, as of late, the app constantly crashes whenever I use it, whether it be on my iPad Pro or my iPhone SE. The Overcast symbol can be seen in the background but after 10 or so seconds, it crashes back to the home screen and it does this again and again, ad infinitum. I’ve been installing all of the updates and trying everything, from clearing the cache of the device to uninstalling and reinstalling the app to little avail. When this app works, it’s absolutely amazing. But when it doesn’t then it is unfortunately quite tragic. I hope that Marco can find a way to remedy this so that I can return to my podcasts.

Love it. Happy to pay for subscription.. A friend recommended Outcast and I switched a couple of months ago. It is so much better than the Apple app. I listen to podcasts for about 90 minutes a day on average. The speed up and optimizing features are great. I have no idea who created Outcast, but I know It takes a lot of work to make a highly functional app with an elegant user interface and keep it updated. Implicit in many of the recent reviews is the belief that it should just be free forever - no cost and no ads. That's delusional. Good user reviews and feelings of accomplishment don't pay the bills. If my clients told me they liked my work but didn't want to pay for it, I'd find other clients. So I'm actually glad there is now an option to subscribe so I can support something I enjoy using. $9.95 for a whole year is very reasonable. That's about what I paid for lunch today. Why? Because there's no such thing as a free lunch. On a related note, the banner ads were a little annoying like all ads, but they're so much less intrusive than many print media sites where the content is constantly playing a game of hide and seek. Bottom line: I'm a fan and please keep up the good work.

My favorite podcast app but very poor application performance. What is there to be said about overcast that hasn’t already been said? It’s great! There are just two things that weigh down the app. The first is the battery drain of the app. Most of the time it’s great, but sometimes it can take my iphone from full power/just off the charger to empty in ten seconds (i am not joking). Other times the background processes get spun up and it’ll drain 20-40% of your battery in a minute or two. Even when you quit the app the background processes continue to drain. It’s wildly unacceptable. The other issue seems to be with the file cache. While the application and data size is clearly explained in the istorage settings, it seems to be incorrect. For some reason Overcast fills up my Other category of files until my Iphone starts crashing from having too little free space. The only way to fix it is to uninstall the app completely then reinstall. When I do this I can regularly free up 2-3g of additional space over and above what the iphone says overcast is using.

I Love Overcast - You’ll Love it Too.. I only use iOS devices. Initially I suffered through Apple’s Podcast App. It was one frustration after another. Finally deleted it. Then I found and tried several alternatives, including Stitcher. Honestly I’ve been happily using Overcast for so long now I can’t recall the specific reasons I disliked the other Podcast Apps so much. But I definitely recall feeling the same frustration I experienced using Apple’s App. Before trying Overcast I read reviews here and also Web articles comparing, contrasting and ranking Apps. Overcast was highly regarded. I’ve been extremely pleased with Overcast. Today I purchased the premium edition, dirt cheap $9.99/year and the transaction is super simple. I didn’t buy Premium Overcast because the standard edition is in anyway lacking. Rather, it’s the least I can do to express a bit of gratitude for all the enjoyment I’ve had using Overcast everyday. Thank you!

Frustrating with iOS 11.. I’m on an iPhone 6, using iOS 11.4.1. This app used to be at least a 4 star app, but ever since iOS 11, the app is more frustration than fun. First, an ongoing issue even before iOS 11, is the amount of space it takes up. I’m finding I’m having to delete and re-download the app every month, because I’m finding it taking up nearly ten gigs of space, despite the fact that I have it set to stream podcasts, not download them. There seems to be no intuitive way to get it to stop downloading. Second, now with iOS 11, I’m having to open the app several times to get it to stay open. It’ll usually crash a couple of times first. Third, and the issue that frustrated me enough to write this review and look for a new player: I listen to podcasts for hours at a time at work, using headphones. Sometimes I’ll need to pause an episode to do some work or talk to someone, and I’ll pause it using the button on my headphones. When I press the button again to start it... nothing. I’ll try again a few times, nothing. I’ll have to stop what I’m doing, take my phone out of my pocket, unlock it, and restart overcast. Sometimes it’ll open and be frozen for fifteen seconds before it’ll start responding, sometimes it’ll just crash and I have to try again. This happens SO OFTEN that this app has basically become useless to me.

Excellent. After upgrading to a new iPhone and having to deal with iCloud back up issues, I was finally good to go. However, the only app that didn’t seem to work was Overcast. Huge bummer, I thought. I had to run the latest public beta of the current OS (not the upcoming OS) in order to get my iCloud back up to work. I assumed there was a bug between Overcast and this newer beta version of iOS. I sent the developer a quick email letting him know. Within 12 hours, Marco had responded, apologized for the issue, and let me know a fix had been released in that time. Apparently a recent update to his app introduced a nasty little bug. I’m grateful that he was quick to fix it. This shows the level of commitment and detail he has for this app. It’s also why I will continue to be an Overcast user. This is an excellent app and deserves all of the praise it gets. During that time, I tried other podcasting apps, but most were embarrassingly confusing and none seemed to just do what a good podcast player should do well: manage and play podcasts. Overcast is easy to use and understand, and it does its primary job very well!

Simply the best. This is the best podcast player out there. It syncs between devices, has speed controls, sounds great when sped up, has smart speed (which automatically removes pauses), seek back and forward 15 or 30 seconds (whatever you set the time to). I love the control. Are there problems, yes. Lack of search is frustrating when looking for a downloaded episode with a particular guest. Also, when in the podcast store you can search by podcast title but not by person's name. So if you would like to search for a guest and see all the different podcasts they have been interviewed on, you cannot. (To do this I go to Apple's app and search then come back to Overcast. What a pain.) Another thing that is annoying - when I searching for podcasts to subscribe to, once you hit "subscribe," it kicks you out of your search, and you have to repeat the same search if you want to add more than one podcast.

So close to perfect!. I love this app. It’s sleek; I appreciate the typeface used on the interface. It looks modern and is a welcome change from the same old font Apple uses for everything. Organization is clean and relatively intuitive once you get used to it. Definitely a WORTHY replacement for the stock Podcasts app, which I used for years before I found this gem. My only problems with Overcast pertain to the Apple Watch app. There seems to be more of a delay when hitting pause or start, and sometimes the pause/start button doesn’t work at all, which is horrible when you need to have a conversation with someone, or you’re at a drive-thru, or when you need the sound to stop immediately for whatever reason. That button needs to work reliably. Second, it would be REALLY COOL if the Digital Crown could be used as a volume control, like in Apple’s “Now Playing” app. It’s really convenient, and would be the next best thing to a reliable pause control. All that said, Overcast is vastly superior to the stock Podcasts app, and can still be controlled from Now Playing, provided the Overcast app is deleted from the Watch. One thing the Overcast Watch app has going for it is it’s MUCH prettier than Now Playing. It can certainly use some improvement, and I’m confident that will happen, because this is a GREAT app!

Nice alternative to Apple’s.. I’ve been well pleased so far. It isn’t always the most intuitive, but I’ve eventually figured out how to achieve most everything I’ve wanted to. The benefits of adding a show via RSS have become immediately clear. Being a subscriber to a show and getting early access episodes and bonus material right in my podcast manager makes it so easy to stay up with all my shows. The clip function has made it so much more effective to get friends interested in shows than years of recommending downloads ever did. The one thing that sticks out at me the most: sometimes I want to keep an episode for a while so I can go back and reference it later, however, although the episodes are marked as “played” the show doesn’t drop down to the “Played Podcasts” section. That doesn’t seem to happen until the episodes are deleted out of the library. This makes it difficult to know when a new episode is available; this show doesn’t release episodes according to a schedule, I have to randomly check to see if there’s anything new in the episode list. It feels nitpicky but it’s important to me. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I listen while I’m working. The less amount of time I have to spend poking around in menus, the better.

Thank you! I can EASILY play podcasts again!. Thank you Overcast, you just took my blood pressure down a couple of points. I have watched Apple experiment and destroy whatever attempts they have made to create an easy to use and understand podcast player. If you want gray hair go try and figure out the crap that Apple has produced for a podcast player. Complicated and difficult to use. I had reached a point in trying to find and play podcasts on Apple’s mess that I was about to hurdle my poor iPad out of extreme frustration. The Overcast app was so simple to setup and use. I didn’t even create an Overcast account and I was up and running with ease in no time. Easy to find podcasts and easy to play them. Apple’s use to be this way until I think they got too much money and decided to hire shoemakers to create a player app. Thank you again Overcast! And Apple, I hope you stub your big toe, for shame for creating such junk.

OVERCAST is the BEST podcast app!’. I got so frustrated with the Apple podcast app (constant changes that only worsened the user experience, increasingly non-intuitive “features” and controls), that I shopped around and found many positive comments about OVERCAST. Sure enough, OVERCAST has made me a happy listener once again, and I now can’t imagine using a different app for podcasts. My feed of podcasts is ridiculously long; some are regular listens, others I visit occasionally. The OVERCAST app helps me organize my pods and track my usage, has great features that no other app has, and sticks to its winning formula. (When it rolls out a new feature, it’s clearly explained and actually makes for an actual improvement.) You’ll note that there are visual ads at the bottom, which I find unobtrusive, and these occasionally suggest a pod worth checking out. (You can also get rid of of those ads for a very modest fee.) This app was clearly developed by someone who thinks about the user/listener experience, and cares about quality and clarity. Sending kudos to OVERCAST from podcast fan in Boston!

Overall pretty great, but a few major flaws. Lots of attention to detail that makes the user interface a pleasure to use. But I ran into a couple frustrating issues. The first was my cellular data usage. iOS showed this app using gigabytes of data, even though I have new episodes set to download only on Wi-Fi. I was using the app off Wi-Fi to listen to previously-downloaded episodes, but I never explicitly downloaded new episodes on cellular. I had to force disable cellular data for this app from my iOS settings. There is no official support email or Twitter handle. I did try to reach out to the app’s official account for help with this, but they never responded. The second issue is with Apple Watch syncing. It’s there, which is awesome, but the feature isn’t well-documented enough. I don’t understand when new episodes sync to the watch. Every time I check my watch for new podcast episodes, it doesn’t have the ones my phone has already downloaded hours ago. Does it only sync when it’s on the charging stand, like Apple Music does? I have tried multiple ways with no consistent results. Would be nice to be able to manually trigger a sync of new episodes to my watch, but I also just wish this was better documented. Overall, it’s a pretty great app, but these two flaws were really distracting and frustrating to my overall UX. I wish the developer had a formal support channel and better documentation to help users troubleshoot these kinds of things.

Best podcast app for podcast fans. Edit: The new update added more support for CarPlay and it’s awesome! Now you can see what chapter you are in as well as all of the other chapters, ‘Star’ and episode, etc, all from CarPlay! This is definitely a six star app! If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you need to try this app!! Even if you are just an occasional podcast listener, you will probably find the smart speed option very helpful. I've been listening off and on to podcasts for a few years, but tended to not listen regularly because of the time it takes to get through the backlog of missed episodes. With smart speed, I've already saved almost 90 minutes in just one podcast after 10 episodes. Thank you to Jason Snell and iMyke of the Upgrade podcast for continually mentioning this app. I use both the smart speed and voice boost to make it easier and faster to listen to podcasts. I haven't tried tweaking any other settings yet and I'm looking forward to see how much time I can save when I start using Overcast to listen to other podcasts.

Great alternative to Apple Podcasts. I think this is a great alternative to Apple Podcasts because you are able to customize each podcast’s settings to suit your needs. He ability to pin your favorite podcasts to the top is a big winner for me. It can take a minute to scroll through your podcasts or have to search for it every time if you have a large library. Having your favorites pinned is a great feature that is lacking in Apple Podcasts. The only thing I am not liking is for most of the podcasts (at least for me) won’t continue playing into the next episode. It will stop at the end of each episode instead. I’ve checked the settings for the main app and the individual podcasts and have still had no luck fixing the problem. I’ve noticed it’s not all the time and sometime it will continue episodes of podcasts it previously wouldn’t. I still love and recommend this app, great work!

Cell Data Usage Notifications Are Poor. We generally like the app, however we are constantly having issues with the following: 1. Pending downloads resetting Consequently our download queue is constantly at 99+ and the app chews through a ton of data. We've had to set it to streaming only multiple times, and also set it to WiFi only, but it appears to keep resetting. As a result we're chewing through more than 10 gigs of data on many months unless we watch it closely. 2. Easy to use a lot of storage space. As your phone fills up with podcasts, it will start warning you that you're almost out of storage space. At this point the app generally crashes. We've had to manually reduce the number of podcasts stored to 2 podcasts on most podcasts and it still hasn't helped much. Recommendation: Better notification and management of data usage by the app, rather than relying on the OS would be helpful.

Frequent Crashes. If this app worked as intended, it would be excellent, however it appears to have some frustrating quirks and stability issues. First and foremost are the crashes. It crashes when you pause about half the time, it crashes when you select a podcast, sometimes it just seems to crash for really no reason at all. On a typical weekday I use this app for about 2-3 hours and will see 1-2 crashes each day. The second issue is that the app will always, always try to play the previous unfinished podcast, even if you have a playlist or have a different cast selected as “play next”. For instance, the last minute of most casts is just an outro, an ad, or credits so I will skip to the next cast. If I allow a cast to play to the very end, Overcast will begin playing the last unfinished minutes of all previous casts even if I have a new cast queued. I’ve used this app for about a year and will say it is better than the native Apple app, but only just barely, owing only to Overcast’s better layout. However its stability issues and infuriating quirks hobble it badly. Update July 2021: Even worse these days! Crashes about every 3-5 minutes. When I relaunch the app, it starts me at the beginning of the podcast, losing my place.

Many good features. Really like this app. First off, all podcasts sound good, really good, thank you. I appreciate the custom timer feature - not just set amounts to choose from. The tiny app size is nice, even though phone storage is getting huge. The view that shows which specific section (chapter) of the podcast is playing is really neat. Speed and voice control are good. Mark as played is helpful. Dark mode is nice, and is even a choice for the app icon (with a subscription). The privacy page for each show is nice (seems like some shows still need to make one). If possible, would like volume control on the lock screen (without having to use the control center). A "Pause all downloads" button or the like would be nice. It'd be more convenient for the Unplayed, and All pages of a podcast to stay pinned at the top of the podcast list when scrolling down, so that it'd be easier to get to the unplayed section, and then maybe even get back to the same scroll position on one of those pages after switching to the other. Would like to be able to use the widget to navigate to an episode's chapter, and adjust the sleep timer. Would like to have a convenient way to re-arrange playlists. The unplayed, active, and archive pages are good but, it's be nice to have a page that essentially makes a 'pinned' list combining all selected podcasts whether they're 'active' or not. Interested to see what improvements will be made. The app is worth the subscription.

Terrible search, worse navigation. Very disappointed after switching from Apple podcasts and giving this a try for nearly one year. The search simply doesn't work - you'll never find the episode you're looking for. If you are just exploring and type in a name of someone that you know has podcast episodes, they almost never appear unless they are very well known. If you type in an exact or nearly exact match you might get the search result, but when you click on the episode it will direct to the list of all episodes for that podcast rather than the episode you clicked on. Until about two months ago there was a hack where you could then click on "unplayed" and wait a moment and the episode would suddenly appear, but it no longer "works". Worst of all, if you then press the back button to see the original search results, to check another result for example, they're gone! It takes you back to an empty search bar. I can't believe how much time I wasted on this terrible app. I contacted support and also asked the dev via Twitter but received no reply. I'll spend my premium podcast dollars elsewhere.

Volume Issue. This app has excellent features, like Smart Speed, Voice Boost, and Smart Playlists. I generally like it a lot, but there are a couple of issues. The search function is terrible. It returns illogical results, if any. Often, it just freezes. There are no reviews or feedback, and it’s not easy to browse for new shows other than the few they highlight. Unfortunately, I have to go back to the native app for that. I actually don’t pay for premium because the ads are, sadly, the best way to find new podcasts on Overcast. Recently, it’s started messing with the volume whenever I disconnect and later reconnect Bluetooth devices. I always listen at a low setting because iPhone doesn’t actually have a low volume option — it goes straight from medium to silent. When I put the headphones back in, the volume is cranked up high every time. I’ve learned to fix it before hitting play (which has to be done on the lock screen), but that’s annoying. It should just work. This is simple. I contacted the developer and never heard back, so I’m warning potential users before they damage their eardrums.

Vastly superior to Apple Podcasts. I switched from the Apple Podcast app after every consecutive update made it worse/less stable. Pods wouldn’t sync between my phone and iPad, frequent crashes, an increasingly unintuitive interface and generally poor performance…I wanted something different. I saw a recommendation on Twitter (from Ringer alum Isaac Lee, who has pretty sterling credentials in the audio medium) and I decided to take the plunge. It’s been everything I was hoping for. Super easy to setup and use, easy to plug in my RSS feeds and generally way less of a hassle than Apple. Very stable. The interface didn’t overwhelm my older devices. I’ve occasionally had hiccups where the audio would pause itself but generally issues have been few and far between. I’m not a tremendous fan of the speed saving function but I do love that I can customize when I use it (I leave it turned on for the boring pods to help power through). But overall, it’s been fantastic.

Good app but there are some problems.. A couple of months ago, there was a pretty significant change to the layout. I honestly can't remember all of them, but I feel like there were tabs on the bottom of the screen that I now miss. However, the largest problem is that random episodes won't play. I can't determine any consistency to why they won't play, but I've seen it on several different shows now. However, if I go to another podcast player, I can get said episodes to play just fine. My review started negatively, but I should end positively. I'm sharing these concerns, especially the one about broken episodes, because I really like this app. It works very well with the screen-reader built into iOS that I use. Despite some changes that I don't love, it is still my favorite of all pod-catchers that I've tried in terms of layout. This is still the pod-catcher that I recommend to all my friends and family, but I hope the developers clean it up some.

Thank you!. To me listening to podcasts should be quick, easy and done without thought. Overcast is providing just that. You have all the functions you need in the free version and the adds are not intrusive. For me it was well worth the $10/yr to support the future development. Even though I consider myself an early adapter and enjoy changes to improve a product, I basically stopped listening to podcasts after the iOS update which changed the podcast app drastically. It is possible I am more forgiving to bumps in the development process when it is a small company or new product, neither of which describes Apple. With that said overcast does have some limitations that to me do not hinder the daily listening experience. The biggest I have noticed is searching for podcasts I am not always able to find what I’m looking for. An easy solution is to copy the url from Apple podcast app, use that in the search and there is no problem finding it. I also haven’t figured out a way to better organize all of my podcasts.

Fantastic. No regrets!. I made the switch to Overcast over a year ago after Apple overhauled their native Podcasts app in a way that I absolutely hated. I have never looked back. Overcast is superior in every regard. There are generous global settings you can fine tune, and you can alter any individual podcasts/series to differ from your global defaults. There are numerous ways to sort both shows and episodes. You can pin favorite shows to the top of the main list for quick access. A simple but clear little blue dot lets you know if a show has new/unplayed content. You don’t have to use playlists to listen to consecutive series episodes (either from oldest-to-newest or newest-to-oldest), but if you like making playlists Overcast has got you covered. There’s a basic main queue available as well as the ability to make endless custom playlists. You can also mark specific episodes with a star and then view all starred together in a single list. I use the star to keep track of episodes that are particularly hilarious, moving, shocking, and/or shareworthy. The bottom line from a prolific listener who consumes 3-10 hours of spoken audio daily: I’ve been using Overcast for well over a year now and couldn’t be happier with the experience. If you’re on the fence just stop the nonsense and get down from there before you fall and break something. There’s a better way to podcast, and this is it.

I finally get it!. I’ve been a podcast junkie for over a decade. Before the iPhone, I would download them on iTunes, burn them on a CD and play them in my car. So the built-in podcast app on iPhone was a revelation. I feel like that all over again with Overcast. First, I was blown away by its ability to speed up pauses to make podcasts play quicker without sounding sped up. I don’t mind a little sped up, so I also liked the wide range of speeds to choose from. The real winner was the smart playlist though. THE SMART PLAYLIST IS AWESOME. I tell it which show I want to hear first, which second, etc., and it automatically keeps the playlist up to date, adding new top-priority shows to the front of the line ahead of older lower-priority shows. (I used to make “up next” playlists each day in the old app. No more!) Finally, just today I discovered custom settings for each show. My news podcasts can rip through at 1.8x speed. My narrative ones I can set for 1.2x speed. The app remembers. I don’t ever have to mess with it again. I LOVE this app!

Nearly everything I wanted and then some. I love this app! It has features I wished were in the built in podcast app like set a custom playback speed for each individual podcast and an actual smart play list that automatically adds my priority podcasts first! So that show that I just have to listen to as soon as it comes out gets placed to the top of the list. One feature, if it’s there I couldn’t find it, I really wanted was a shuffle option so when I add a new podcast and all the past episodes I can just shuffle them in to the playlist. Right now I have to do this manually and who wants to do that? Features that I didn’t even think of, the smart speed. Some podcasters speak really slow with long silences between words and 2xs speed isn’t quite right and anything faster you can’t understand the words. Having the app shorten the silences is GENIUS! The Voice boost has allowed me to turn down the volume! I don’t struggle to hear what some of the soft spoken hosts are saying.

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Love this app. This is a fantastic podcasting app. Without a doubt the most visually pleasing, but it's features are killer too. Missing are the ability to "favourite" great episodes to return to later, and the ability and to make playlists out of entire podcasts (rather than individual episodes), but other than that, it's perfect. I am using the free version and the ads are fairly unobtrusive, but I am definitely considering paying the small fee for the premium version.

Good app bad UI. The app itself works great, smart speed is awesome, haven’t had it crash etc but dear god the UI on this thing is the most unintuitive thing ever. You can tell the app developer is a pretty good engineer but is clearly lacking UI dev experience or design flair for that matter. For instance, oh that podcast looks good I’m not near Wi-Fi but don’t mind using mobile to download it before my flight. *click on podcast* Hmm ok nothing here to set it to download. I can share it (don’t know many people who do that but fair enough). There is a star... no that’s not it. Ahh settings up top might have it. Nope... Oh it might be elsewhere. So top level menu I have a broadcast icon thingy, that might be it. Nope that’s app settings. Not sure why on earth settings would be on top left and how a broadcast tower icon relates to it. Hmm it wouldn’t be the + because that’s add a podcast and I’m not sure why but apparently people make enough playlists that it needs to be a top level menu icon, even though it’s at the top of the main podcast list. Must be the little down arrow, makes sense download. Ok waiting to download... how do I set it to cellular?? Tap Long press Tap tap Swipe righ. Delete ! Please please let swipe left be it.... *please turn off all your electronic devices as we prepare for take off* Arghhh

The best podcast app. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I really didn’t like when Overcast withdrew support for my older phone/system (I hope it was absolutely necessary, a lot of us don’t have much money…) and had to go on a tour of other podcast apps. Yikes. Fortunately got given sis’s older phone so I could download Overcast again. So flexible and intuitive by comparison, am loving it! Only downside is sometimes I find myself subscribed to things I don’t want, I think ads must be quite easy to subscribe to in the pocket.

Needs a mark as or mark all as played.. Love the app, this is super nitpiky, but it needs a mark as played or mark all as played buttons. Even in a sub menu. Reason being, OCD more then anything and also to stop old eps of podcasts I’ve started listening to downloading. It’s a minor frustration when starting a new podcast that has 100’s of eps that is not necessarily required listening and I just want them not queuing up.

Great so far. App is stating no internet connection despite my iPhone X now being connected to WiFi (and 4G prior) so won’t find new episodes at the mo. Other than this random issue, I really like this app, it’s easy to navigate, looks pretty, doesn’t Ad! at you, just ads quietly away for your consideration, and is fairly glitch free. Playlists and priorities are all great to manage your library. I just need to be able to download some more episodes now. Thanks for a groovy product.

Just switched another podcast from Apple’s podcasts. The UI seems very well thought out and rich. I can generally do what I need to without having to think or hunt too much, and navigating through the app is clear. Recently on Apple’s app I listened to 2 episodes of a podcast then wanted to see the title of the first one. It was not clear how. So I went to Overcast, quickly subscribed there and was able to see what I want. And a benefit of that is that from now on I will be able to get those episodes quickly.

Simply the best, better than all the rest. This is the Swiss Army knife of podcast playback. There are so many superlatives I can pour on it, but I’ll stick with noting 2 things: 1. The app size: hardly anything these days comes so lean, and it’s usually because apps are busy collecting information about the user rather than doing what they’re actually supposed to do. 2. Which brings me to privacy: Overcast respects its users’ privacy throughout, a rare accomplishment these days. In other words, if you’re looking for a podcast player, look no further. This is as good as it gets.

I like this app but?. I would like to give Overcast five stars except for one reason - the adds. I paid for a premium service and I don’t get any adds when I listen in my iPad, but I when I listen on my phone (which is most of the time) I get all the adds which is very annoying. I know advertising is important, but if I have paid for a premium service, I expect no advertising. I cannot find anyway to contact the developer, so I guess I just gotta put up with the adds. Excellent service otherwise.

I love the Overcast app!. I recommend Overcast for all podcast listeners, from beginner to addicted power-user. The user interface, great playback options and quality design are all fantastic. My very favourite features, as someone who subscribes to 100+ podcasts, are smart speed, vocal boost and the ability to speed up playback to 3x the normal speed. I spent a couple of months training myself to listen and now have my podcasts exclusively set to 3x speed which allows me to take in so much more content. Smart speed and vocal boost means the audio quality remains clear and easy to understand even at that speed. I only wish I could take things up to 4x. Maybe in the next update!

(Still a) Great app!. Update in March 2021: I continue to love this app, appreciate the subtle design and respect for privacy. Original: Love the experience, and am thinking of paying for the premium experience (as I use this SO much). One thing I’d love in a future update: the ability to transfer the downloaded episodes as files to iTunes. I’ve had to backup & restore a phone and then got a new one which meant two lots of multi-gig download sessions which could’ve been avoided.

Apple Watch app not working properly. I have used Overcast for several years now, and believe that it’s definitely one the best podcast apps available. The only real issue that I found with the app to date has been the Apple Watch app. This has a tendency to either not download podcasts, or only partially download them. I purchased a new Apple Watch to be able to exercise without the phone. Many times, I have been able to start a podcast; however, it simply stops 10-12 minutes in. This is really the only thing preventing this from getting five stars. I love the way that I am able to organise podcasts, the audio is incredibly clear, and the adjustable speeds for each podcast make this a brilliant app.

I love Overcast!. The native iPhone podcast app has been “updated” (without consultation with users) to the point where it is difficult to use, and unusable while driving. So I thought I’d try Overcast. What a refreshing change! An app that is intuitive to learn, simple to operate, and allows me to enjoy the podcast. To the developers of Overcast, I’d like to say congratulations and well done! To Apple, I just want to say that I have deleted yet another useless Apple app which has been rendered unusable by an “update”.

Another iOS 11 podcast refugee. I am another iOS 11 podcast refugee. Apple has completely destroyed their app. Apart from the horrible UI they have also removed the automatic play of next episode in a podcast. So you can play one podcast then you have to manually start the next one?! Overcast is clean, easy to use, and most importantly plays the next episode of a podcast automatically. I have gladly subscribed to this great app.

Superior to Apple. I’d been using the podcast app built in to my phone without ever trying anything else. Then Apple in their wisdom go and do an update and make horrendous changes. I went searching for a new app that day and after reading reviews, decided on Overcast. I’m SO glad I made the switch and discovered all the cool features you could have whilst listening to podcasts every day. From a creature of habit, Overcast has me converted! 😎

Love it BUT.... Really love this podcast but it’s missing 2 things. It needs the ability to review podcasts like Apple podcasts does so that the recommendations area would be better to find new highly rated podcasts. Also the way to add a podcast to a playlist is so clunky and time consuming. It should be able to be done from the podcast settings section. So when you subscribe to a new podcast we need to be able to put it into a playlist at that point - not having to navigate to the playlist and then edit the playlist, then scroll down to the add podcast section, then have to find the podcast name again - way too many steps.

Its simplicity makes this a winner!. It just works well. If I could wish for something extra it would be the ability to customise the settings more. To allow more choice of Keeping unplayed podcasts from current 1,2,3,5,10,ALL to a selectable number. And two customised delete podcast options. Allowing a selectable number of both played & unplayed podcasts to be deleted.

Almost Perfect. This is still the best podcast solution out there. It's simple, fast and reliable. Some of its pioneered features like smart speed have made their way into competing products but I still feel the best quality version is from Overcast. The only thing that bugs me is how recommended/starred podcasts as implemented. There's no way to easily find podcasts you've starred. In the podcast list there's an emoji showing that an episode is starred but if you wanted to just see a list of all episodes you've starred you can't - you have to scroll through the podcast list and find it manually... That's the only thing wrong with this app for me.

Amazing. This app is just great, i’ve used the apple podcasts app before and other podcast streaming apps in the past but i always find myself going back to Overcast, because it just works, and it’s great. However i have an apple watch and the apple watch app for Overcast is mediocre, it works sure but i could do with a little revamp but i understand the Apple watch Overcast community is quite niche. Please Please Please update the apple watch app, that would be amazing.

Best Podcast App on the App Store. Free or Paid. Marco has created an absolutely wonderful podcast experience with this app and I am so incredibly grateful for his continued support. Timely updates, a subscription service to podcasts that allows you to manage everything yourself and a wonderful UI that ties it all together. As soon as the ability for yearly subscriptions became available I bought it because this is one of the few apps that I use every day without fail and have never had a bad experience.

Best podcast app available. Being able to automatically download apps in the background while in wifi, and then listen to podcasts at custom speeds are absolutely genius functions. Best podcast app available at the moment. Plays all podcasts I subscribe to (not all podcast players do), the only function I'd like to see installed is the ability to stream video for the new wave of "video podcasts".

Amazing. A fantastic app, especially with the latest update! I was using apple podcasts until recently, and the raw speed of pausing and playing a podcast is leagues ahead of apple podcasts, which often takes seconds to play on my iPhone 12. Also, there are so many little things it does better, like pausing the podcast when Siri gives you directions. The new UI has some work to be done but looks significantly better than the terrible old UI. A significant update!

The best just got far better. The most recent update (5.1.2) delivers a feature that I have been hoping would be coming at some point, telling me on the playback screen the name of the connected bluetooth headset (I often listen to podcasts in the middle of the night whilst settling children, and knowing where the audio will pop out is rather important), I know this is a small feature, but it is so needed. New navigation for effects, info and chapters is also a welcome improvement. This on-top of great Apple Watch syncing (that works and I use all the time), smart speed (that has saved me many many hours of time) and a raft of other thoughtful features. Love this app, keep on test driving everything else, and always come back. Thanks Marco, keep up the good work.

Long time Apple podcast listener. Last update in June 2021 finally broke my love of apple podcast. After 17 years Apple broke own app. Battery life was horrible and phone was over heating. Been long time fan of ATP so tried the app from Marco. I love it and will go premium to say thanks for a great app l am in Australia and use podcasts to go to sleep and this apps works great. Also use when at gym Why does apples app kill my battery and get super hot. Also the search function works really well on this app. Why can’t Apple offer an easy search Thanks Marco. And my favourite podcasts is ATP.

My favourite podcast app. Overcast continues to be my favourite podcast app. Smart speed and voice boost are essential features especially when listening to shows with amateur production. I also use the upload feature (via subscription) to listen to audiobook files I own. Making this not just the best podcast app, but the best audiobook app. Thanks.

Extremely intelligent design. The best podcast app: no contest. It dynamically adjusts speed and removes silences - not that you'll ever notice. It allows the user whatever level of fine control they want. It is absolutely perfect EXCEPT that recently a bug has arisen in which the sound cuts out (but the podcast is apparently still playing, according to the time counter) after about a minute of listening. Also, there's one more important matter: It is very disappointing when a great designer/engineer politicises his product (in this case by boycotting all users in a particular nation). That action is very unfair to those everyday people who almost certainly want peace, would never have initiated anything themselves and would probably benefit from having access to the rest of the world's podcasts and opinions through Overcast. Please consider reopening Overcast to the entire world. Amazing work. 👍

Solid App. I’ve been a user for 5 years. It’s easy to find and add podcasts without much fuss, but if you want to tailor it more (which you will) there are many well considered options that can make your podcast listening very pleasant! For me, I especially like the adjustable sleep timer; how easy it is to set up a playlist with the latest however many number of episodes that fall away so (I can pick and choose); or a playlist to download a whole bunch while you’re offline travelling. An app for all other apps to aspire to.

More functionality than Apple Podcast app. Having used this app for several months after years of using the Apple podcast app, I’m really enjoying the extra functionality - the range of play speeds, the custom settings for each podcast, the ease of use, the ability to create playlists and more. Still a little clunky at times, but way better than apple’s own podcast app. It’s no my go-to podcast app, and I’m looking forward to seeing ongoing improvements.

Pretty good. This app is overall much better than Apple podcasts. The only feature I miss is that Apple podcasts automatically deleted an episode that I had listened to, but stopped a few mins before the end (Eg to skip the ‘credits’ or an ad at the end). In this app, the auto delete function only works if you have listened through to the absolute end of the episode.

Love it but missing one thing. There is no ability to play a playlist. I can add multiple podcasts to custom playlists but after the first one is finished playing it goes to the next item in the “queue” instead of the next item in the custom playlist. Keep up the good work. I love the app so far I even paid for the premium :)

Number one app for podcast - no contest. As usual, the default Apple apps are no good. If you like podcasts (and who doesn’t?) then you know that simple user interface, access to all the pods, all useful features without useless ones and reliability are what we podders want. Overcast nails it, proving again talent and passion beats money and size every time. This is the number one podcast app as voted by actual podcast listeners.

Bring back offline use for non cellular watches. Another disappointed long time user. Have always used this app that worked fantastically to force download certain podcasts to the Apple Watch to use offline (non cellular watch) when running. The native Apple podcast app only lets you download recent ones or everything. Unfortunately with the latest update and even after deleting the app off phone and watch and reinstalling it no longer works. I send the podcast to the watch and I can find it on the watch as before (the watch icon on the not the phone icon on the watch interface). However as soon as I go for a run and am away from my phone/wifi the podcast stops working. As a previous reviewer stated. Yes the uploading via Bluetooth before was a bit clucky and slow but at least it worked. Please fix this to go back to 5 stars.

Absolutely Incredible. I actually cannot believe how exceptional this app is. It has everything I want in a pod catcher and so much more. All the expected features are there: speed up playback, playlists, auto episode downloading etc. but on top of that it is fully cross platform between iOS devices with an insanely handy one button sync of all podcasts, playlists and settings, and keeps episode progress synced automatically. Other features include full Siri control, gap less audio, a voice enhancer that makes the audio more crisp and clear, smart playlists with full priority control, light, dark and black themes and all this with a slick, intuitive and VERY easy to use UI and settings. Easily the best and prettiest podcast app I have ever used.

Great App, Could Do with Some changes though. I Love the app, but one of the things I wish would change is the “suggestions for you” section. Most of the suggested podcasts are ones I used to listen to but no longer do, and the suggestions don’t change, I have the same ones in the section that I had over a year ago, I wish they would rotate them and show different ones. Only a small thing to complain about however as the app is great

Nup… still not liking the new interface. I used to love this app until the recent update. I I left a review when it changed but there were many other reviews with people loving it. Months on I like it even less. It takes more time to see what’s new and I’m constantly flicking through the three options to see what’s up. Even after unsubscribing from over half of my podcasts I still miss new episodes sometimes not seeing them for days or weeks. I miss the simplicity and the efficiency of the old layout. The broke what was perfect. Looking for a new app.

Very good podcast app, I switched from pocketcasts. Switched from Pocketcasts looking for something that is more privacy conscious. One huge feature missing that is a real step back is no ‘in progress list’. Like many I switch between podcasts and don’t always listen in one go. I’d like to see a list of my in progress episodes as I don’t often finish episodes before switching. (I listen to more light entertainment based creators at the end of the day when I have less energy). Including a in progress list would make this app basically perfect. A starred episode list would also be cool inside the playlist area.

Another Great Upgrade. Version 6 - Even better. The best podcast app around. The Smart Speed feature that removes pauses has saved me over two weeks of listening time. Given I use podcasts for professional development, that one little feature has let me listen to an extra 352 hours of podcasts, that is a lot of knowledge gained. Over a month of lectures at 8hrs/day. Thanks Marco.

So much closer to what a podcast app should be. Ah, this is more like it. Love podcasts, have tried so many apps, but by the time you have a gazzillion subscriptions you’re overwhelmed. That’s where Overcast comes in - especially the Smart Podcasts, which I love (I have categories like Comedy, Politics, Sport, so I can immediately see what’s most recent out of not just my favourite podcasts, but particular topics). Add to that the amazing features for controlling playback speed and gaps ... I went premium within the week just to support the developers!

Like one of my children, only useful. The newest update made me wonder if I’ve ever written a review. In case I haven’t, here it is. I’ve been an overcast user from launch day and I use it more that any other app, maybe more than any other thing in my life, except maybe my bed (maybe). I never want it to do anything more than what it does, until a new feature is released, then I wonder how I ever did without that thing. Anywhere else I’ve tried to listen to a podcast feels like visiting a foreign country where everyone hates me. For the price of subscription (or free, if you must) it’s absurdly great value. If podcasts are your thing, I know of no reason why you wouldn’t try it and can’t imagine you not liking it. 5 million stars

Please bring back older (working) feature for Apple Watch podcast playback!. FINAL UPDATE: For Apple Watch I have now switched to Outcast. Designed only for Apple Watch, one click and I can download, from Wifi, directly to my watch, no phone needed. With a progress bar to see it download, and super fast (pickup watch, click download, 1 minute later, out for a run. UPDATE: Tried everything and syncing and downloading to a non cellular Apple Watch simply doesn’t work, or has no indication of it working for me. A great app to be sure, but now one that doesn’t work with (my) Apple Watch. I understand the need to update asn app to make it better for people, however, by removing the main feature I used (syncing a podcast over Bluetooth, with speed settings to the watch) I can no longer use this app as I originally had. Yes, Bluetooth sync was a bit slow and buggy, but it did work, and it worked well. This new system, looses the main thing I like about your app, speed boost, and I can never really tell if a episode has downloaded to my watch (I just see a cloud on it?) Please let users choose to use an older feature Marco, even if you think they shouldn’t! Thanks

As good as it’s gets. This is probably the best podcast app on iOS. The controls are so intuitive and well designed. It’s clear a lot of thought has been put into it. It pretty much blows away the default podcast app (and other podcast app imo). If you listen to a lot of podcast I’d highly recommend you get this instead over the default app. The UI is very well designed and much better than the default. It’ll take a really long time to explain it so I suggest just downloading it and using trying it out, you’ll see what I mean. It’s much more we’ll thought out than even apps like pocketcast imo. The sound engine and AI is so well designed to shorten silences, speed up voices while they’re still understandable, and smart speed adjusting the speed to enable you get through a podcast as quickly as possible. Are all quality of life features that enable you to cover so much more content in the time available. So if you’re a busy individual this podcast app will probably allow you to listen to more podcasts than you otherwise would’ve the time to. And to top it all off the app is free with all the ads out of the way. It’s seriously on of the best implementation of ads I’ve seen in an app. You won’t even notice them. So it’s essentially a free extremely high quality app with a premium experience. You can ofc pay a very small yearly fee if you’re keen on getting rid of the ads and gaining some nice customise features like changing the app icon.

Just keeps getting worse. I've been using the app since it first came out. It was perfect. A simple podcast player with some nifty tech to make podcast more listenable (Smartspeed and Voice Boost). Even its reliance on a back-end service, which I was dubious about at first, was a benefit since it dramatically sped up the process of checking for new episodes. I bought the original version, and even subscribed for awhile after the licensing model changed. Since then, the creater has done his darndest to ruin the app. Every update, every new feature, every interface change has been for the worst, to the point where the app is almost unusable in it's current state. If it wasn't for smartspeed saving me so much time, I'd ditch it now. But it's a high mental cost for that one benefit.

Wish I’d Found This Sooner. I found this app because Apple Podcasts became so bad even I couldn’t stand to stay any longer. I wish I’d jumped sooner! This app is so easy, and it just works. I can set up a playlist on the fly. I can trim the beginning and end of my regular podcasts. There’s some trickery that cuts out empty space. This is so good I’ve subscribed to show my appreciation, and kept the ads on because they are helping me find new podcasts to listen to.

Best app ever. I already left two ratings when prompted by the app - day one and then again another prompt shortly afterwards. I normally never rate apps but it seemed good so I thought ok. Now that I’ve been using it for a month I feel like yelling from the treetops. This app is clean, reliable, intuitive, well designed, well supported and has all the functionality I need. Lots of other audio apps hang for ages or don’t work at all. Not this one. Fast and reliable every single time. WELL DONE and thank you for making it available. 👍👍👍

Finally CarPlay mode gets some love. UPDATE: CarPlay is badly messed up at the moment. CarPlay navigation of Podcasts doesn't work (is blank) until I unlock the phone and navigate to a podcast and start it - which is illegal in my country while driving. Then all the navigation key presses catch up. Have to reduce stars until this is fixed. This has been a great app for years but the CarPlay support was severely lacking (perhaps because the sole developer drives a car that doesn’t support CarPlay). It was frustrating enough that I had half-switched back to the Apple Podcasts app. Now, with the Recently Played screen the car experience is much more useable.

Excellent. I bailed out of the Apple podcast app a few years ago when they stuffed it up by ‘improving’ it. I found Overcast - cannot remember how - but after no time, found it to be simple but perfect. It is easy to use, and a recent update actually DID improve it, without dropping any of the attributes that embedded users have become used to. I definitely recommend this app, and thanks to the developers for keeping it simple, but absolutely doing what we want/need it to do.

It just works flawlessly. I've listened to podcasts daily since the early days of having a Blackberry phone (yes - I'm that old). Overcast just works the way I expect a podcast client to work. Syncing between my phone, watch and iPad is flawless. I endured tha Apple Podcast app for years before I discovered Overcast and how I wish I handed put up with those years of frustration before making the switch.

Almost Perfect. Overcast is an app that works extremely well and I think that it just edges out Pockcast as a superior product. However, I do think that Pocket Casts does two things better. Firstly, I think that it's management of the queue is better, and secondly I think its layout of the podcast screen is a bit better. Overall though I'd say it's the superior product, specially those who use a Mac like myself and whom desire to listen to podcasts on there. The Overcasst app completely trounces the (from my experience) often buggy web player for Pocket Casts, as well as being free!

Simply the best. After months or years of frustration with the big fruit I came across Overcast and my podcasting life has never been the same. So much friendlier to use and has far more nifty options. And don't even get me started on that big streaming service who wants to invade my music with podcasts - no thank you! Get overcast, make yourself happy.

A good solid podcast app. I like Overcast, but it appears to have become a bit buggy. I can’t get it to play the next episode in the series reliably (it seems to choose something else based on date rather thanks just play the next episode), and Play Next doesn’t ever work. I also wish I could force it to use mobile data to download - I have a large enough data limit and want to choose if I want to wait for wifi or not. Streaming works ok but I’d like the choice to download for later. Otherwise it’s a far better app than the Apple version, and I’ve yet to find one I like better.

In a world of podcast apps. This one allows you to organise your podcast episode by the podcast, not en masse in some predetermined order like many others. This is the feature I really wanted. I find the controls easy to interpret and everything is simple. Podcast apps don’t need to be weird or complex if you ask me. Put it on and play the one you want without having to go to multiple pages first, that was my goal and this app meets it best as far as I can see.

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Because Apple's Podcast App Sucks. If you love podcasts, and having them sync seamlessly via your devices, you probably are super annoyed with how poorly Apple's own podcast app works between desktop, phone, etc. Overcast is made for those who want a wonderful experience and not have to mess around getting annoyed at syncing issues. Completely functional with the free version, you decide to pay because you want to support great apps, and considering the low cost, you should definitely do it.

Landscape view!?. Why not implement landscape view? I would then be able to see full podcast title instead of having to click on it.

Getting really slow for me. I have a lot of subscriptions, but I have an 11 Pro so I assume my hardware should be able to handle it. Often, doing anything in this app has a 1-5 second delay, which leads to tapping again assuming I mis-tapped and then I get all the cumulative taps seconds later.

Best podcast app, bar none.. Long time user, it’s fast, lightweight, and a great piece of software.

New update is nice but hard to look at. The redesign brings some welcome features but the typography choice is a disappointment. It does not look good on my 13 Pro screen and my eyes strain to look at the app with this font.

Great except not compatible with Sonos. I love this app. I just wish it would work seamlessly to connect and play over airplay on iOS with Sonos One.

Love it. Of the non native podcast players I like this one best so far. I would like a 'save episode' feature. Love the smart speed.

Horrible with iOS CarPlay since latest update. Since the latest update it as been useless with CarPlay. I have deleted and gone back to Apple podcast

My go to podcast player. Best of the bunch for audio. Wish it did video.

overcast. freezes & crashes constantly. no end to it. i wish they'd fix these issues.

A great update to a great app. I use this app for hours every day, and often use my Apple Watch to control it. This latest update has made the Apple Watch controls extremely snappy. Where before I had to wait a few seconds when changing podcasts for the list to display, it's now snappy and responsive. Great work by the developers to the best podcasting app out there.

Episodes disappearing from playlists.. I took a lot of time to painstakingly build playlists compiling episodes from various different podcasts by subject, and then I check by and find the episodes gone from the playlist. I did not listen to them yet or manually delete them. I still can’t figure out why the episodes keep disappearing or if it’s possible to prevent that. Very disappointing app. I just want the simple feature of being able to prepare playlists for myself to listen to while driving.

The best!. After settling for one reason or another with a few other podcast players over the past couple of listening years including mostly the original Apple player I finally installed overcast. Grateful I did! This is the best player by far that I have tried. Zero weaknesses IMO. Fast intuitive and does everything I want it to do. Awesome job guys and gals. A++

Best Podcast App. I’ve tried every single podcast app you can think of and I keep coming back to Overcast. Simply the best.

Great, Would be perfect with a couple more features. I am so glad Overcast added search. I would LOVE an option to “delete all ‘started’” podcasts to optimize storage. Right now it only deletes episodes that are 100% completed and I never listen to the endroll ads so I manually delete episodes. Other than that, great app!

Great. The best podcast player I’ve used, both in terms of stability and options. Well organized and also straightforward to use.

Randomly Erases everything. Used to love this one. I listen to a lot of poscasts, in the past month, this app has erased everything I have subscribed to and downloaded twice. including a paid subscription for multiple shows, and it’s annoying to have to add all those back by rss feed for the 3rd time. Switching apps.

Simple. The apple podcast app was giving me headaches because it is crowded with features that leave me confused, and I couldn’t get it to work with my apple watch (even after spending an hour with an apple tech expert) . Overcast is allowing me to navigate easily and to get the podcasts I want. I finally found an app that synchronizes seamlessly with my apple watch.

Kills your data. I’ve seen it mentioned in other reviews... but this thing just burns through data in shocking ways. Even while it is sitting idle. Not a fan of the apple app, but definitely going back to it. Done with Overcast; no second chances.

great app. great app easy to install and work with

Arment is slime. I paid for this app when it first came out, and Marco Arment’s thanks to day one buyers was to put adds in for them and tell them to subscribe to get them removed. Up yours, Marco!

Great app. A real gem - great features - indie developer - doesn’t get better than that.

Much better options out there. There are some pretty nasty bugs (iOS 15.2) that avail themselves slowly as you become accustomed to the app. Take your time with this one before committing to a subscription. I tried contacting the developer but he just ignored me. There are better options out there.

Solid podcast app. Huge podcast listener, overcast is the best podcast app I've used. Simple, clear, intuitive. Totally happy to subscribe and support!

Solid (With a big caveat). Probably the best podcast app for iOS at the moment. Simple, nicely designed, stable. Smart Speed is a great added bonus. Edit: App burned through 3.4 GB of data overnight doing absolutely nothing. Welp.

No way to stop downloads. There is no option to stop automatic downloads

Have loved Overcast for Ages but super glitchy. The last few weeks, this app just keeps closing whatever episode I am listening to once I am about a minute and a half into the show. It will do this 3-4 times so that I have to continually restart the episode until it finally continues to play. I really hope they work out whatever big is causing this otherwise I’ll have to switch podcast apps.

Good features when they work on Apple Watch. When the app works, it’s great. Thrilled to have a watch app that allows you to download specific podcasts to the watch. The interface is good and simple to use. Have had no problems with the app on my phone. But on the watch, I have had multiple instances of podcasts just stopping playing and then refusing to start again, which is enormously frustrating, or refuse play continuously.

Search function doesn’t work. The search function is a critical feature. Can’t search for specific episodes.

Unresponsive developer. Emails to developer go ignored. Good luck if you have issues and/or need support.

Great App, all said.. Wish there was a download all, single button. Their process for downloading a backlog of podcast is a bit cumbersome as it is.

Slow and sluggish, barely usable on my iPhone 6. Used to run just fine, smoothly, but a few revisions ago it became non-responsive and frustrating to operate. The developer ignores any messages, not providing even a polite reply of ‘thanks for the info’. Must be the arrogance of leading in the market of non-Apple apps.

Buggy. The app refuses to play more than the first 30 seconds of a podcast.

Very good but.... I wish I could easily see which episodes I’ve already downloaded. It’s not easy to find a needle in a haystack. A smart playlist with downloaded episodes (or even starred episodes) would be amazing. Also the lack of a solid iOS widget is a weakness. I’m moving on after having moved the app for a while, but these shortcomings have been tiring.

Really great app. Really great podcast app - definitely the best one I’ve used. Great job, Marco!

Ugly UI changes to a once great app. A change is good they say. More often than not that’s not true. This is one such case. Overcast has been my go to podcast app for as long as it has existed. The recent UI changes have me reconsidering that. Ugly and impractical changes that waste huge amounts of screen real estate to no user benefit. I am actually and genuinely (surprised by this reaction) disgusted by the unasked for aesthetic changes. It hard to look at and less straightforward to use. Extraordinarily disappointed.

Good program despite censorship. One way of knowing whether a program deserves my support or not is to verify whether it finds Alex Jones’ podcast in its search. Overcast doesn’t, and as such loses a star from me. What’s the point of using an alternative to Apple’s program if it ends up blocking some feeds the corporation seems to be wrongthink?

Latest update causes app to lock up. Before the latest update I would have given the app a 4 star rating, at least, but since the latest update the app freezes every other time I try to use it. Usually it is after I have used the app and then left it in the background no being used. When I go back to it to try to continue listening to a podcast it will not play and the screen locks up

Great App!. way better than alternatives

The best pod-catcher on iOS. This is simply the best podcast app around. Love the rich playlist features, the clean design customizable controls and all from one single developer. Truly a work of love. Can’t imagine using my phone without it.

Overcast. Way better than the apple podcast app.

List of features missing. - ability to mark played/Unplayed - prevent or turn off streaming - prevent auto downloading When added I’ll come back as no podcast on iOS will ever replace podcast addict

Space hog. App has fundamental flaw. It never deletes any podcast unless you completely listen to whole thing. Result is that it grows space used until you’re out then you have spend tedious time deleting pod episodes one by one.

The Best Podcast App. Please just use this instead of apple ****. This one has sync and a feature that speeds up the dead pauses in podcasts.

Bad update. It’s so hard to delete podcasts that are played but not completed.

Love it, but wish it had these two essential features. . .. Great app, but there is currently no way to view a history of played episodes. This means you are out of luck if you are trying to recall am episode you listened to while walking the dog last Saturday morning. Overcast gives you the ability to create playlists as well as star individual episodes. I created a 🌟starred episodes playlist to store episodes that I might want to relisten to or reference in the future. These starred episodes are found in two places: a regular playlist, as well as the “🌟Starred Episodes” playlist. If I delete the episode from one playlist, it automatically deletes from the other: grrr! This is counter intuitive and I discovered this flaw the hard way: I cleaned up several of my regular playlists assuming that the starred episodes would still be on my “🌟Starred Epidodes” playlist :(.

A podcast player that's incapable of playing any of my podcasts.. Another quality Marco Arment production. p.s. “no technical support available” for a subscription app lol

Finally a user friendly app. Some podcast app are way to complicated this one clic and play. Perfect

Deleting playlist. Every time I make a playlist and come back to it an hour or so later it’s been deleted. Completely gone. So downloaded content isn’t accessible.

Just works.. This is a simple app that simply works. It has never crashed or failed. I have over 30 gb of downloaded podcasts and the apple handles the data fine.

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Smart playlists…who knew?. I started using (and subscribed to support) Overcast several years ago based on the fantastic smart speed feature. I’m finally writing a review because I discovered another game changing feature yesterday. My podcast listening habits changed during work from home and recently my list of unplayed episodes started to get a lot longer than I like. I wanted to be able to sort all the unplayed episodes by date rather than poking through the list of podcasts. I couldn’t find a way to do it but I thought, Marco has to have done something for this…and sure enough he did. Not only can you look at a sorted list, you can easily customize that list and how it auto-populates to such a perfect level that I don’t think I’ll ever poke thru the podcast list again. Thanks for making my favorite app!

Great audio features. UX could be better.. I'm a subscriber. I don't think there's a better podcast app out there... That being said, the UX has never been super intuitive, the UI is pretty good, but has some glaring shortcomings like ginormous playlists that take up the whole screen, no podcast sorting, prominent buttons for tasks that are not common (like the + to add new podcasts), etc. And simple "no brainer" features, like a listening history for example, are missing. Or maybe I can't find it? I'm not even confident I really know this app... You know those apps where everything is where you'd expect it to be and whenever you just try something, it was anticipated by the designer and just works? This app is the opposite of that. BUT... The audio features are the absolute best of all podcast apps I've tried, so I'll stick with it. I just wish the dev hired a UX designer consultant... 😅

Great podcast app. Missing 1 feature. If this app had the “download all” or “download 100 in bulk” like Pocket cast has, I subscribe to it and never leave the app. I love the search option, the clean interface, and the simplicity of it. I travel all the time and buy the biggest capacity iPhones so I can keep all of my history podcast on my phone. Going back to old episodes when I feel like touching up on a subject is key. So when I find a new history or Supreme Court case podcast that I want to binge, I go straight to Pocketcast so I can use the Download All option and sift through the episodes as I binge. Now my niece has me listening to My Favorite Murder and I want to start from the beginning and have the episodes downloaded and stored on my iPhone. Have to use Pocketcast for this and have Overcast start downloading the new episodes so I can switch over when I’m done catch up.

Please make streaming the default. I began using this app a few months ago for a podcast that provided its paid subscribers a link to the ad-free feed in Overcast. After a while, I decided to use Overcast for all the podcasts that interest me, and I’ve been gradually adding their feeds since then. Problem is, Overcast is set to download the three most recent episodes by default. This is bizarre to me in 2023. After all, data is cheap & podcast audio files tend not to be very large, so it’s a bit strange that downloading and not streaming is the out-of-the-box setting. (I also spend a good amount of time streaming on my home wi-fi network.) This gets to be a problem, because I find Overcast frequently fillng my phone’s storage to capacity, and the operating system is forced not only to offload other apps, but some of those apps I use frequently (like my password manager). Further, I’ve found that deleting the downloads from within Overcast doesn’t always work, and the app doesn’t seem to respect my choice to change to streaming. Today, I discovered that Overcast was using about 29 GB of the storage on my iPhone (which has a capacity of 128 GB). When I tried to delete the downloads from within the app, Overcast appeared to have frozen. This is a bad design: cases like these require displaying some sort of progress indicator. I hope that a release in the near future will incorporate that feature.

Dumped Apple Podcasts LOVE OVERCAST. Apple Podcasts, along w some others recently made changes so that I no longer can binge listen podcasts. I do that when I find a new podcast and want to listen to a bunch of their old episodes while catching up to more current ones. Also, when I’ve missed several episodes of podcasts I regularly listen to. Now, after one episode of the podcast I want to listen to, Apple Podcasts forces a different podcast on me, one I don’t want to listen to at that time. How awful to be driving, and suddenly you’re stuck listening to a podcast you have no interest in, you already know there’s nothing on the radio, which is the reason you listen to podcasts, and the miles slowly roll by = bye bye Apple, hello Overcast, which lets me decide what I want to listen to, and when! Free!

Awesome Player!. Great podcast player! I love how unplayed episodes are separate from All the episodes of a particular show. I used to have to deal with either listening to a show in reverse-chronological order or have to scroll all the way down past hundreds of episodes to get to the one I want. (Apple Podcasts🤦‍♂️) But with this one, ALL the episodes of a show have a tab, and individual episodes can be added to the unplayed queue of what’s next for that show and new ones are automatically added. Great for listening to a daily, long running show, like a news podcast. The only problem I have with it is that there is no volume slider!!! It’s a small detail, but sometimes I want to slide a slider and can’t press the volume buttons on the phone. Other than that, it’s great!

Highly customizable and innovative app. The quality of improvements since I subscribed 4 years ago have been huge. The only thing better than an excellent app is an excellent app that is always in the process of development. It's neat to see other apps at long last pick up sweet features like smart rewind that I first discovered on Overcast years ago - feels a little like owning an app from the future, it's always a few steps ahead of the game. All the customization in nitpicky details - the ability to add RSS feeds - the smart speed and 3x - the touch of humor in toolbar explanations - and my favorite feature, that I am now mad at all other apps for not having: the smart rewind when you pause - these are small joys that make me use Overcast every day. And all this for a great deal. Recently I was on a long car ride with a friend, there was only one phone holder and he had Apple podcasts installed on his phone. I was so annoyed that all my favorite fiddly little features were missing that I literally installed overcast on his phone to play the podcasts on our trip the way I wanted. So basically what I am saying is that this app is so good that I have started to go around forcibly installing it on other people's phones. 5/5 stars

Marco - The new UI is a miss. I’m writing this review hoping that Marco actually reads these. I was looking forward to a UI refresh, but I don’t understand some of the choices that were made. The main UI changes are the addition of the Recent section and filters for Active/Inactive podcasts. Here’s why those don’t work. I’m not sure what the purpose of the recent section is. What’s shown there are the podcast covers, which suggests tapping one will take you to the podcast because the rest of the UI has trained us to expect that, but it’s actually linking to the most recent episode. If there are multiple episodes available, I think that most users would want to be taken to the oldest I played rather than the most recent. I don’t see a way to configure this. Even if it did, I would rather have this real estate used to show more of the list of podcasts rather than this recent gallery which I think will confuse a lot of people. Active/inactive/unplayed - These filters are a decent idea, but having them on the same sliding panel as All Episodes and Recent is a strange UI design and is not intuitive Inactive - it’s frustrating that how podcasts are filtered in here isn’t clear. This would be a useful feature if those parameters could be configured under “Nitpicky details” Active - Being able to sort this by most recently updated would make it more useful.

Great update to a great app. I’ve been using Overcast for a few years now, and I’ve racked up more than three hundred and fifty hours saved with smart speed across at least fifty different podcasts. Overcast has the best smart speed system of any podcast player I’ve tried, everything just sounds great on any setting. The 4.0 update brings a few quality of life features that I’m enjoying, plus the removal of the empty space at the top that I was not a fan of. One tap play streamlines my podcast playing, and some other gestures are easier as well. I will continue to pay for Overcast Premium for as long as I listen to podcasts. The dark theme and icon are really nice as well. I’ve been wanting fonts to be separate from themes for a while, and now I find I really like the black theme, even not on an iPhone 10, but a darker app icon to go with it would be nice.

App suddenly freezes on open. I haven’t really been using the app that long; only since about April (or whenever Apple decided that it would be better to play episodes in a “custom” order by default rather than consecutive; this broke the podcasts I typically listen to because they’re mostly news) This works fairly well, but recently it has started freezing on opening. I don’t know if it’s because of the amount of podcasts and it’s just checking EVERY podcast for an update (this would probably cause it to freeze since I listen to quite a few, but I know for a fact they aren’t updated everyday) or the amount I have downloaded (I try to delete the episodes I listen to, though, so this seems less probable) This is just annoying because I haven’t actually finished an episode that is still sitting in the player and can’t get to it while the app is like this (nor can I get to my backlog to delete stuff to actually test if that’s the cause)

Some good some bad, will continue to use Podcasts tho. I’ve been a longtime Apple Podcast user and have always known that it’s meh but haven’t tried anything else yet. I’ve been listening to ATP for a couple years and finally decided to try out Overcast. The good stuff: Control while playing is great. I love the 3x speed option. You can actually see the podcast markers (not sure if this is even possible in Apple Podcasts cause I’ve never found it). “Nitpicky details”: lots of good customisable settings in here that I’m glad exist. The bad: I’ve found myself confused by the different queues and what they mean and how different podcasts get there. As of right now, I’m up to date on all 16 podcasts I listen to but on the Home Screen every show has an orange dot next to it (which I assume means has an unplayed episode). I don’t know how to remove that orange dot. Also, using the word Delete when you swipe left on a podcast on the Home Screen feels like the wrong word. In my mind you could use delete to delete a downloaded episode off the device, but that Delete button is actually unsubscribing from a podcast. Unsubscribe is a long word, so I prob pick Unfollow (not married to this word choice but Delete feels wrong). Neutral: if I wanted to switch to the app as my main podcast listener I’d want to be able to pay to remove the ads.

Great app, but I’m looking for a more features. Overcast is an great, easy to use app. However, I sometimes come late to podcasts and want to listen to them from the very beginning. It is a pain to manually download them beginning from episode 1 (some podcasts have hundreds of episode). I would love the option to download automatically in sequential order, rather than “new episodes” that reference precious episodes. I don’t want to download an entire series just to be able to listen to them uninterrupted from the beginning. And I don’t want to keep more than 5-10 episodes on my phone at any given time. Currently, if I’m on episode 200, I have to scroll down past the first couple hundred played episode to get to the oldest unplayed episode in order to download it. It would be great to “untoggle” played episodes so I am only seeing unplayed, undownloaded episodes.

Back to Awesome!!!!. That worked, thank God! Life is SO MUCH BETTER!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I loved this app, and still do the parts that drew me to it in the first place. It is easy to use. It has a streamlined interface that works great in the car. It works great period. It is the only app I have ever recommended to people without solicitation. Now the sucky part. When I first got the app you could pay about 5 bucks one time and get the pro version without ads. It was so nice. Something I turned on and saw only the app interface. In the latest version, because I paid my 5 bucks, I now have "limited ads" that showed up at the bottom of the screen when I play an episode. To get rid of those would cost 10 bucks A YEAR! It's because of this kind of thing I got rid of Stitcher. Guess I'll be getting rid of Overcast soon as well.

Once Great App Now Has Alzheimer’s. Used to use Overcast a few years back when it first came out and it was pretty great with the speed listen features. Friend sent me a timestamped link to a podcast today he listens to on Overcast. Messages preview doesn’t respect the timestamp, so I tap in and it brings up Overcast app instead of Safari. Overcast gives a sync error and tells me to log out or ignore. I ignore but get a sync error and no Timestamped podcast episode I was sent. So tap the preview in Messages again and this time choose Log Out. Get asked to provide my Overcast credentials and pull it from 1Password. Overcast tells me the account doesn’t exist under that email in 1PW. Pretty sure that email was it but try another email it could be but it also is unknown. So here I am, now logged out and unable to log in without creating a new account. I go back to Messages and tap the episode preview again because surely I can listen to the timestamp given even without an account? Nope, just the login page to greet me in my personal Godot hell.

Do you think people with large phones are blind?. I came to this app years ago when apple made horrible design change. It was simple clean app. I could quickly see most of my podcast very quickly. Imagine my surprise when I opened the app after it auto updated and all i saw was the three un used play list and a now play section with these massive useless images taking up the whole screen. I when into my system settings to see if some accessibility settings were turned on but not this was a design decision. What a waist of space. The only saving Grace is that i could complete delete all playlist but that still leave the note playing section that takes up a very large portion on the screen. Once i get to the lists of podcast, I can only see 7 at a time!!!! WOW, I am going to get RSI issues from having to scroll so much in this app now. I do frustrated. Lastly, the 3 tabs. Who are to decide what podcast is considered inactive. Just because it has an in frequent release schedule does not mean it is inactive. If i am subscribed to it, it is active, period. I will choose to remove it if I want. This has to be a configurable setting to disable if you do this. Actually, i just want an ALL tab to give me the lost just like it was before. I had a work flow designed around the way the app was before. Just because I am not subscribed does not mean I do not listen to those show regularly. This update has me looking for a new podcast app.

Outstanding. Unlike the iOS 11 interface of Apple’s stock Podcasts app (Apple... what were you THINKING?!), Overcast (which is audio only) is clearly made by someone who actually listens to podcasts. The design is simple, making it easy to manage and listen to your podcasts. Creating your own playlists (by episode), voice boost... it’s really well done. I hope someday it’ll play video podcasts, but I won’t knock it for what it’s not currently. The feature I hope is made possible soon is the ability to set to auto-download per podcast instead of a universal setting for all podcasts. Some podcasts I want to listen to every episode. Others I don’t, but I don’t want to have to scroll through and delete the ones I don’t want. Overall, this is the replacement podcast app you’re looking for! 5 Stars!

A Great App Hampered by Stale Ads. I’ve been a longtime overcast user and would categorize it as the first great podcast app on iOS. However in the time since, the space has become very competitive. Also since that time, ads have permeated this app just as they have most “free” apps. I originally paid for this app in an option no long available. My account has changed such that I no longer have the paid app in my history and can’t turn back the clock to buy it again. The free app was also not created separately, like some app authors from that time. Now the only way to remove the ads, which sit directly on the now playing screen, is to pay annually. There is also no “lifetime” option. For folks looking for podcast apps, I suggest reviewing all the options as many other apps are awesome these days, and many ads or IAP. For the overcast devs, I suggest dogfooding the free version for a few months and seeing if there might be better ways of monetizing it, such as highlighted podcasts sponsored in searches.

One of the best apps in the store. Edit: 03/22 With the most recent update, the redesign of the app has brought this into the year 2022. The color choices are a welcome addition, and all the other changes are welcome even if I won’t use them (mark as played, playlists changes, recently added). Well done Marco! I have been using this app since I got an iPhone, and I’ve never been more satisfied using an app in my life. Marco has done some amazing things here, from smart speed to voice boost, to the general usability of the app. Makes podcasts fun again. Thank you for the continued work on Overcast, and I look forward to the future. If you’ve never found podcasts before this is a great place to start. Community recommendations as well as popular downloads, I’m always finding something new.

Fairly easy to use. I have enjoyed using this player for some time. It is easy to find my podcasts and I like the simple controls and visual display. What I don’t like is the episode sorting mechanism, especially since I like to listen to most podcasts from the beginning. When I choose Unplayed, I get a partial list of episodes, both played and unplayed. I have to select All, then scroll down to the episode I’m looking for. And when it ends, I have to catch it and physically select the next episode, or it will go to the latest one. I would love it if the selection buttons worked properly AND if I could select what to do when an episode ends... go to the next in the series, go to the newest, stop completely and wait for me, whatever. I listen mostly when I’m driving and it would be a real help to not have to wait until I have a chance to fiddle with the app when an episode ends.

Outstanding. I resisted this app for a over a year, because I’ve been relatively satisfied with Downcast to handle my podcast needs. While that program is powerful, with plenty of bells and whistles, its sync capabilities among devices was, in a word, poor (for which I blame iCloud, not the developer). Any way, Overcast is in fact as good as everyone says it is: clean, intuitive interface (certainly compared to Downcast), and the sync’ing across devices, including the web interface, is superb. The special effects such as voice boost and smart speed are clever and enriching for the podcast experience. Perhaps the critical feature, the absence of which had previously had kept me from trying the app before, is now the availability to download and play podcasts when offline. Overall, this is a really well thought out, stable, and extremely satisfying app. Great job.

My favorite podcast player!. I’ve tried every podcast player I could find and this one is far and away my favorite! Easy to navigate, you can custom sort each show by oldest or newest first, small app size, LOVE the quality-of-life features (the voice boost is so essential for me; there is also a shorten silences option and a speed up/slow down). The premium subscription just gets rid of the tiny ad bar at the bottom of the screen, which I didn’t find very intrusive, and gives you app icon color options—so you don’t have to worry about having to pay for any of the core features. I ended up buying a subscription just to share my support, because I really appreciate this app and I use it almost every day.

Disappearing Play Next Button?. I’m a premium subscriber to Overcast (an option that really doesn’t provide important features; I just wanted to support the app I loved), and I was shocked to see the new design update after years of use. I like the general aesthetics of the new app but the change up of buttons has me scratching my head. Most significantly, while I’ve located the play next button (cluttered with an annoying amount of other options in the “…” icon to the left of play), it disappears as an option seemingly arbitrarily. For instance, it’s available on one podcast I listen to (The Plot Thickens) and unavailable on a different one (372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back). I can curate my playlist manually, but that is adding a couples steps and minutes to a process that used to take a single click. I’m a loyal supporter of this app, but please sort this out in an update.

Very Cumbersome to Use. Not What it used to Be. At one time this was a decent app. A few issues I’ve encountered are: 1. Playlists are at the very top of the home screen. This means if you have created any playlists, you have to scroll down through them to get to the Podcasts you have subscribed to. Which brings up the next problem. 2. The Podcasts you subscribe to are listed one on top of another and the App gives you no option to change this pattern. This results in you only being able to view 6 (at the most) at one time of the Podcasts you have subscribed to, is extremely annoying and results in you constantly having to scroll up and down through your Podcasts when you are browsing your shows or looking for a podcast that you can’t remember the name of. There no option to rearrange any of this either. Even the free versions of most other podcast apps aren’t this sloppy and lackadaisical with the layout. Makes me wonder if the developer is just lazy, don’t care, incompetent or in over his head and too stubborn or stupid to get help. 3. Beware of the Apple Editors Choice award that’s prominently displayed on this App in the App Store. I suspect it’s from when this App was actually deserving of it. I wish Apple would put a year the award was given so us customers could use that rating when making our decision on which app to spend money on. Look elsewhere for a decent podcast app because this one just don’t get it anymore.

Good, but has accessibility flaws. Overcast is my favourite podcast app. It is well designed, and most of the time I have no problems with it. However, I suffer from Raynaud’s syndrome, so when temperatures drop even slightly below 18C/65F, my hands start to get cold. And by the time it gets to freezing, the only way my hands can function at all is if I wear thick gloves. As a result, I rely on Voice Control to use my phone when I am outside during cold months of the year (which is about half the year here). Voice control is a great accessibility feature that maps tappable assets on the screen to names or numbers, so instead of pressing the button that says “Back”, you can just say “press play”, and the phone simulates the touch. Most apps have no issues with voice control. However, a couple, including Overcast, do not fully comply with it. For example, if you have selected a podcast from the list, no number shows up next to the play button. Voice control offers a workaround for missing tappable numbers (by constructing a grid of m*n rows), but that makes the process of asking it to press play take 3-4 commands instead of 1. I imagine the reason that Voice Control fails to pick up on some tappable assets is because Overcast doesn’t encode them in the same way it does regular buttons. If this can be fixed, I would give this app 5 stars, because it deserves it otherwise.

Best Podcast Experience Available. There is no better way to listen to podcasts. The speed adjustment offers much finer control of speed than other apps, and smart speed is a fantastic addition. I turned on voice boost when I first started using the app and I’ve never turned it off. The app works great even when my list of subscriptions becomes especially bloated, which was(/is?) a problem with Apples podcast app. OverCast isn’t great for discovering new podcasts, in my opinion, but Apples podcast app and iTunes are both incredibly broken. I know there are other podcast apps out there, but none of them are competitive in any way. I wish that podcast discovery was better, but outside of that I am incredibly impressed with the quality of this app. I’m especially impressed with the regular improvements, as Overcast seems to have no real competition when it comes to quality.

Used to be flawless. This is the only iOS podcast app that was made for people who enjoy listening to podcasts from the very beginning. The ability to simply toggle from “newest to oldest” to “oldest to newest” was what set Overcast apart in my opinion, and now that has been lost with a recent update. Yes, it is still possible to sort your podcasts, but now you must go into the settings, which is just that one more step that I do not want to do when I’m in a rush and want to get to my podcasts. Also, the CarPlay interface, while useable, can use an overhaul. So instead of updating features that were perfect, maybe focus on other aspects, guys. While this may sound a bit angry, I’m just annoyed that my favorite app, and my favorite feature, has been changed. I still appreciate all the hard work that has gone into the development and running of this app, and I appreciate how it is free and mostly ad free. Thank you.

Many ways to organize episodes. This is why I use Overcast instead of Apple Podcast: customization. I have my two dozen podcasts grouped into playlists, and within those playlists I can customize the order of playback. For example, when I found Small Town Dicks true crime podcast, I set it to start playback from the first season and come forward to present. I gave it its own playlist, b/c if I’m binging it I don’t want other pods mixed in. But the News pods I ordered for the most recent to show at the top. I have those grouped together in one or two playlists. History daily type pods are together, etc. But I don’t have to open any specific playlist; I can just go to “Episodes” for a look at all episodes with most recent at the top if I want to listen to the opinion by three different podcasters on a recent event. I like customization!

One missing feature away from perfection. I finally gave up on Apple’s podcast app, and I’ve been using Overcast for a few days now. I will never go back to Apple. This podcast is put together thoughtfully and has a great user interface. The only thing that frustrates me, is that this podcast app does not have a queue. I cannot figure out how to manually choose what episode comes up next while listening continuously without manually creating a playlist. I also cannot look at a queue to see what is coming up next, I just have to wait to find out if something plays, then look at what it is. That is frustrating. I’ll need to use the app for a bit longer before I know if this is a feature I can get used to living without.

Powerfully simple (when it works). Update November 2023: Overcast has always had some small, occasional lags for as long as I can remember, but it's gotten really bad over the last few months. Opening the app or switching back to it after a few minutes (while listening) takes 5-10 seconds to load almost every time. Once in the app, it's a gamble as to whether tapping a button or switching screens will work right away or lag another 3-8 seconds. I'm also now experiencing somewhat regular crashes for the first time ever. I'm on a 14 Pro with the latest iOS and app version. I love Overcast and have converted many friends over to it, but if the app keeps degrading and performance doesn't improve, I'll probably need to switch to something else more reliable. There's been a big update teased for a while, but I have no idea when that's happening or if it will fix things. Original review: Simple, clean design. It's intuitive, and I love the features it offers – smart speed, voice boost, playback speed, playlist ordering, playback controls, custom feed subscription, subscription options. I never find myself confused, frustrated, or wishing it could do something, which I constantly felt with the native iOS app. Going on 6-7 years with Overcast and never looked back!

Best Podcast Streamer by a long shot. So, so many helpful features. It seems Overcast has a solution for ally my little annoyances about podcasts - and can even tailor your settings per podcast, since they all differ. It’s fantastic. And the updates are great - new features to explore. I don’t want to listen to podcasts any other way now. Just tonight I thought “i wish it would know I finished an episode even if i didn’t listen to all the credits” - it only deletes them if you listen to the very end. But when I went to look there it was - I can set it to automatically skip a specific number of seconds at the beginning or the end. Fantastic. And it’s customizable so it can be different for each podcast. I love this app so much, this is my very first multi paragraph, detailed reviews on Apple! Love it that much.

Just fades into the background allowing podcasts to shine. I don’t typically write reviews, but while digging into some of the app’s settings, I saw the rating prompt and enthusiastically plowed ahead. And that is probably what my review will boil down to: I enjoy the experience of this app enough to where I almost automatically wanted to write a supportive review without having identified why I like the experience so well. I can’t enumerate the reasons why I like this app so well, just praise the overall experience. In thinking about it, I have concluded (at least preliminarily) that this app just gets out of the way and lets me listen to podcasts, which is the point. Like utilities: Nobody thinks about electricity until it goes out. Also, smart speed, the cutting out of pauses without having to speed up the playback is awesome, saving me time without forcing me to listen to fly people. It’s super-reliable, too. It doesn’t crash; doesn’t spend five minutes pretending to download a podcast only to flash the cloud icon again; doesn’t re-download podcasts I have already listened to; synchs between devices; plays back on one device exactly where it left off on the previous device. Huh, I did have some reasons.

Loved it, had to delete it. Loved the app, and it deserved all the high ratings, but when I got my new iPhone X I noticed battery drain issues, and Overcast was the culprit. Even if I hadn’t used overcast that day, it would always show as having used over 50% of my battery for the day. Hopefully there will be an update soon. Until then I have to knock a couple stars off. Update: After the recent iOS update, I decided to download and try overcast again. I listened to about five minutes of a podcast and then turn the app off came back later and overcast app was already at the number one position of my battery usage, and the phone was very warm. Update 2: I think I have figured out the battery drain. For some reason, it was trying to download every episode of every podcast that I was subscribed to. After deleting the entire download queue, it’s back to normal.

A longtime favorite keeps the magic alive.. This is my favorite third party phone app, and has been for some years. It’s rock solid, easy to navigate, takes my privacy seriously and adds genuinely useful affordances to the podcast experience — namely processing that makes voices easier to understand and speeds play without compromising comprehension. It’s also one of a very few SaaS apps with a respectful and I hope for their sake sustainable business model! $10/year is a more than fair exchange of value for what I get back. Thank you for continuing to take a rarely-traveled middle path in choosing a SaaS model to compensate yourselves for iteration, but keeping prices much lower than you could probably get away with. I look forward to using Overcast for many years to come.

Seriously the best. This is the best podcast app I have ever used. Frustrated by the IOS Apple installed one? Don’t you hate how they keep changing the layout? Use this app. I’m writing this after about a month of everyday use (2-4 hrs a day, commuting and exercising). First, the layout is simple and makes sense. Second, you can enable super cool features in the “settings” (upper left hand corner). You can control when podcasts download, how many download, WiFi/cellular, and tons of other settings. Third, when listening, the audio options give you more controls during playback that aren’t found on other apps. My favorite is smart skip. Overcast reads the audio and skips over any segments of “dead air” (no one speaking, kinda like a break or lull). This saves a little time and keeps the content rolling pleasantly. 4th while there are banner ads at the bottom, there are super unobtrusive. I have only seen ads for more podcasts. There is an option to pay 9.99 annually to support the app and I believe it is worth it based on the quality. The app never asks for reviews or throws the subscription in your face. TLDR - easy layout, great options for organizing and listening, and it’s free.

Perfect Podcasting App. This is a very elegant, clean App that gives you everything you want just as a free App. If you upgrade the paid version you get some extra goodies, plus you’re supporting a great indie developer. The new Ads are elegant and actually interesting to look at. I’ve actually found a few interesting podcasts I still listen to from them. Added to all that is the fact the creator is a very open and honest guy, you read through his FAQ and his Privacy Policy (Which is in normal English) and you feel like you know exactly what you are getting when you spend your money. It's developers like Marco I want to support because his business plan is built on being straight forward and honest and just giving me, the customer, awesome features to enjoy! Thanks again Marco!!

Best Podcast App. This is the best podcast app out there. The sorting and playback options make it easy to manage all your podcasts. I like to sort my downloaded podcasts from oldest to newest so they play in order, but when looking at all available episodes of a podcast I sort newest first so I see the latest episodes at the top of the list. This is the main reason I use this app. This is the only app I know of that can do that. You can set play back speed globally or individually for each podcast, which is great because I can speed up slow talkers and playback slower for fast talkers. Voice boost makes voices clearer. Overall sound quality is great too. I subscribe to the Paid feed of Sam Harris’ podcast and this app makes it easy to add the subscribers’ RSS feed.

LOVE the update! No further qualms!. This update fixes everything I took issue with with Overcast previously. It refreshes the previously-outdated design, adds “Queue” functionality (I know one could have done this this with a playlist before, but I wanted a native feature), adds a “Mark as Played” button, and allows for color customization. It is also a breath of fresh air that Marco makes Overcast completely free with non-intrusive ads. This actually makes me far more likely to want to give him money, and I think if more folks thought that way the App Store would be a better market. Marco really knocked it out of the park with this one—I’ve switched back to using Overcast full time and am subscribed! By far the best podcast app on the App Store; please try it out if you haven’t!

Super intuitive, ideal for binging. I really enjoy the layout options and control settings of this app. I’ve tried out multiple podcasts apps and none seem to run smoother. I got crashed after listening for 3 hours straight on some other apps but haven’t had a crash on this one. I love the auto-skip feature for shows that start or end with lots of ads. I love the sliding metric for how fast to have a podcast run and that it is saved custom for each podcast. I listen to the news at 2.5X but true crime deserves no more than 1.4X. The app now tracks which episodes you have listened to with a big check mark (used to just say “played” instead of a time stamp) to make it easier to jump around. They fixed an old issue of only the most recent ~500 episodes being available on a podcast, but I noticed that was fixed! So, in summary, a great app with good features that is actively being monitored and updated to improve. Thank you, Marco! Feedback for future updates: statistics! I would probably enjoy (and fret) seeing how much time I have spent on this app, total time listened to per podcast, time saved by using increased speed control, and total hours available of podcast content per podcast.

*Was* Best podcast app, hands down - before update. So sorry to say it after all the work that went into the redesign, but it’s just unworkable to not have *all* my podcasts in 1 vertical column - having to keep scrolling up and down to select current list vs inactive ones is driving me crazy. I’d be so grateful if you could bring back the old single/unified list of podcasts. Thank you again though for all the work on this app- which I have SO enjoyed till now. My prior review: I adore this app- been using it many years, & love everything about it. You can customize it to really make it work well for you, huge selection of podcasts, you can just tell it’s developed by a lovely person. Even the ad version is pleasant - the ads are just for other podcasts, very unobtrusive & actually give great recommendations to check out. Thank you so much for keeping this going and the wonderful attention to every detail!!

Frankly amazing. Recent convert from Apple Podcasts, which I’d used for at least 15 years since early iTunes days. Its just been irredeemably awful for the last few years and it’s getting worse; the last straw was when Apple Podcasts suddenly stopped synching my shows and their listening history/progress between devices, and a month of Apple Support tickets later I was rudely told there’s nothing they can do. I immediately signed up for Overcast and got premium, and a month later I’ve had not one single issue. I have it synching perfectly between alllll my devices. Ironically, it uses iCloud to sync, so I can’t imagine why Apple Podcasts couldn’t get it to work. Big sigh. Additionally, Overcast is massively more powerful than Apple Podcasts, and has a buttload of features. I like the chunky interface.

Way better than Apple Podcast App but…. So I have been using this app for years now and it is great! Much better than that garbage Apple Podcast app that to this day cannot be fast forward or rewound by the car toggle switch. I even pay for this app so I don’t have ads. With all that said I have beef with this app now that has been driving me nuts lately. When I listen to some shows with multiple segments, which is becoming more frequent, when the final segment is completed instead of going to the next day on the playlist it goes all the way to the newest episode. DRIVES ME FREAKING CRAZY!!! Especially when I am driving because I have to mess with my phone or the screen which I hate. I know there is a setting for this but no matter how the settings is set it does the same thing no matter what. Please for the love of God fix this issue please! Thank you Overcast Guy.

For Me, Not My Rating. Finally! An app that cares about me and my experience with it, not just my rating/review and money. I don’t write reviews often, but this app warrants a reckoning and acknowledgement. I’ve used this for years and, despite some issues with Watch syncing in the beginning, I’ve never had major problems (unlike Apple’s [endemic] Podcast app). As a result of this consistency and thoughtfulness, I believe I owe it a review. The free version is completely accessible save for a few non-impactful options. As a result, I willingly give them my money for their efforts. Maybe in 20 or 30 years we’ll see more “free” products that earn the money they receive instead of badgering and annoying it out of users via ad’s and strategic feature restrictions.

Amazing. Someone recommended this app to me a little while back and I have been using it religiously ever since. I love all the speed control features, and can't fathom going back to the glacial pace of normal speed. Love the ethics of the developer, and I like that I get to support a great product! There are some minor usability issues, but overall it's a really brilliant and reliable app. Something I would LOVE to see, but may be asking too much, is a way to set my podcast to go off at a certain time in the morning. Alarms don't wake me up, but podcasts do! I can't find a single podcast alarm app anywhere, and as this is already my podcasting app of choice, it would be amazing for it to also have this. I would certainly be happy paying for premium for that functionality alone, and there's a clear gap in the market. Keep up the great work!

Love this app. Customization is through the roof. I have been using an loving this app for a few years now. For free and everything is perfect and you get everything. I wasn’t much into podcasts but now it’s a daily habit. I love the easiness to subscribe, set rules for each podcast or for all. Making playlists is a breeze. It beats the native app in millions of ways. I just paid the upgrade. Not because it does anything other than remove the very unobtrusive almost unnoticeable little bottom banner (that is about other podcasts, not random stuff). I did it because I definitely get way more that $10 worth a year of enjoyment from this app. The latest update to the interface is awesome. I was almost late this morning picking the right icon for my playlist. Solo developer up in NY. Great job and thanks!

Phenomenal Polish. Having read the blog post about VoiceBoost 2 before updating the app, so I decided to see if I could tell the difference. Before updating, I played an older, lower quality podcast from my feed. The highs of the audio were grating over my HomePod, in contrast the lows sounded a bit muffled. I then updated the app, and continued playing the same podcast. The difference was immediately noticeable and jaw dropping. The podcast whose audio was inconsistent and grating, was suddenly incredibly smooth and clear. It took audio that was previously hard to listen to, and transformed it into a positive listening experience. While overcast has always been my preferred podcast app, VoiceBoost2 changes the way I hear the audio itself, and it is now an indispensable part of the way I experience the medium.

Smart Speed MAKES this app. I’m a fairly avid podcast listener - my second favorite feature is that I can make smart playlists, like one that puts all my news podcasts together so they go one after another in the morning. What really makes me an Overcast devotee is the Smart Speed feature, which you can turn on for just some podcasts, turn off for specific ones, or leave on for all of them. Smart Speed finds places it can speed up your podcast without any real cost to listening quality. I save time without having to listen to hamster voices! I do think this feature could be improved, but my biggest gripe is that there is no way for me to see half-played podcasts, if I have to stop listening in the middle of one, I can’t sort them to put the ones I’ve started at the top. I’d really like an update which includes something to separate those episodes that I haven’t finished yet from the ones I have!

More intuitive than Podcast app. I tried using Apple’s Podcast app for weeks, but the workflow for managing podcasts and episodes never made sense to me. Overcast simply clicked with me, and I’m glad I gave Overcast a chance to become my primary podcasting app. The polish on this app is equal to or better than the Apple app with great performance and nice customizability. The ads used in this app are barely noticeable. I love the dark theme and the “smart” options for eliminating silence in the playback and equalizing voice volumes. There are a few bugs I found: the Please Rate Overcast button doesn’t work for me, and I did experience a crash while messing with settings while an episode was downloading. I’m also not a big fan of the default font, but thankfully that can be switched to the system font in settings. Otherwise, I am very happy overall with this quality app. Marco has done a top-notch job and this app deserves the great reputation it gets.

The UI is Confusing. This app is a solid podcast player, but has an odd UI. I have two problems with Overcast. One, the sync to watch settings are global and not per podcast. What I want to do is set specific podcasts to sync there last X number of unplayed episodes to my watch. Instead, Overcast lets me pick which podcasts to sync, and how many total episodes (across all podcasts) to sync. This results in weird behavior where it refuses to sync the podcast I want and syncs more episodes than I need from another podcast. Two, the filtering of episodes is really confusing. When I’m looking at a list of podcast episodes, there are two views: unplayed and all. Currently the “unplayed” tab on one of my podcasts shows a bunch of episodes that are marked as “played”. What? Also, the term “keep”, and “delete” seem to be used to refer to a podcast’s episode in my list of episodes, but that makes no sense. You’re showing me “all” or “unplayed”. A “delete” from the unplayed is actually a “mark as played”. Instead, “delete” should be reserved for that status of an episode with regards to whether or not it is downloaded to my device or not. The UI could use some serious thought and streamlining as I often run into usability issues like this. But at the same time the playback options are great and the core of the app works well, so YMMV.

Great App. So like many others, I found myself with the latest iOS update hating the Apple podcast app. I’ve tried the other big podcast streaming apps available on the App Store, but this one’s strikes the perfect balance between not being too over complicated, yet having enough settings for me to make the app personalized to my preferences. It also has some of the old features that I like most about the old Apple podcast app. I think everyone will like the streamlined design of the app, but do try out the new features like smart speed and voice boost. They change the weight the podcast plays to make it more enjoyable. All in all, I’m very satisfied with this app, and I’m not sure that I would switch back to the old Apple app even if they brought it back.

Simply the best. My friends and I switched to Overcast several years ago bc it's so much more intuitive than all the other podcast players out there. You know it's a good app bc we have all stuck with it for so many years even though we know there are other options. One of the features I love that got me hooked is the skip intro seconds and outro seconds. I also love being able to set the playback speed of individual podcasts since some of them I always like to listen to more slowly or quickly than others. It also works really well with Siri, so I can tell it to skip any number of seconds just using my voice. The developer continues to make updates to keep it fresh and improve the look, feel (haptics!), and features. Thank you!