Pocket Casts

TL;DR -- ShiftyJelly (Pocket Casts devs) has been testing 'v7' in beta for a few months now. It removed some pretty basic features like multiselect on podcast episode menus and support for playlists as a whole. So when they took v7 out of beta and auto-update happened -- users who had dozens of playlists saw all of them suddenly wiped out with virtually no warning.

As of right now, it's in between the devs and users who paid for v6 and didn't expect features to be yanked out of nowhere.

This does seem to be creeping into the Play Store as well

Pocket Casts' newest Android update is being so badly recieved that Podcast Republic is up to #7 on the Google Play trending charts. I don't know where PR started, but this morning they tweeted they were excited to hit #10, so they're climbing fast.

A full fifth of the top 20 and the top 25 trending apps right now are Pocket Casts competitors, and their review score has dropped a tenth of a point since I started paying attention. Dunno where it started, so it may have actually dropped farther.

@theskywasnohelp on Twitter:

Part of the backlash has simply been the response from the dev team which seems to be deflect with snarkiness, rather than admitting any remote chance of error

EDIT: wrote thousands of words about the exact issues with v7 on a WordPress blog

Also, it seems like the Reddit post from their Chief Product Officer was designed to windup the angry mob if this Slack convo is to be believed --

[ Removed in protest to the Reddit API changes, and longstanding issues with Reddit's treatment of moderators. ]

Just came here to say I love Pocket Casts and wish I discovered it earlier!! Forced me to switch from Overcast because of the new update not supporting anything below iOS 15. Its just so much cleaner and simple to navigate. The custom playlist filter option is fantastic, would recommend.

[ Removed in protest to the Reddit API changes, and longstanding issues with Reddit's treatment of moderators. ]

The new app can no longer: Show the progress/scrubber bar of an episode Add episodes to a queue Rewind Fast forward Skip back/ahead by 10/45 seconds Show how long an episode is Increase the speed (1.5x, 2x, etc)

The new app can: Start an episode from the beginning no matter where you are when you tap it (even tapping the currently playing episode will start it over again)

Shuffle whatever episodes are in the context you’re in (all podcasts new episodes? Shuffle em. Single podcast unplayed? Shuffle em.)

Repeat function that works like good ol’ CD players did back in the day. But for podcasts.

——— Just adding my 2 cents to the pile of issues about the latest update. Wild to think of how this passed however many approvals it needed to ahead of launch. I can picture devs and QA folks warning about it and hope they aren’t getting the brunt of the backlash.

Now that they have quadrupled the subscription price from what I paid, I'm no longer going to use them. Are there any others that have the folders option like Pocket Casts? I use that all the time to sort my podcasts. Also, I like how I can skip so many seconds at the beginning and end to avoid the often overpoweringly loud theme music and such.

PocketCasts has posted a list of the top 100 podcasts of 2019. Quite a few on there that I hadn't heard of, or haven't listened to yet. Looks like I have some catching up to do in 2020!

Version 7.0 is a significant downgrade, removing features that users paid for and relied on. The Pocket Casts team doesn't seem to have listened to beta feedback on these issues, and I don't see any indication from the team's responses here or on Twitter that they care about these complaints, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Why did you degrade the app? Why did you not notify users or ask them before removing features we paid for? Is Pocket Casts now deleting users' files without asking permission?

Personally, I'm particularly annoyed that I can't sort by played and unplayed episodes--hardly the biggest issue, but one that aggravates me because I have many old episodes queued up. Some of them are just for fun, like years-old episodes of HDTGM I'm planning to listen to once I see the movie they're talking about, and some are for research. I'm a writer, and some of the people I write about have short-lived but interesting podcasts; I've saved lots of old episodes to use as sources.

That last point particularly concerns me. I've been reading comments here that suggest that PC now deletes files if the feed is removed. Does that mean that when I dig through my old podcasts, the episodes I'd saved will be deleted from my phone? If so, that's a huge problem for me.

Even if not, this downgrade sucks. Obviously people used playlists and obviously people sorted their feeds, so removing those features is baffling. Doing it an update that adds no useful features and brags about listening to feedback is borderline insulting.

Now we all have a ton of work to do. For some people, that's just figuring out the new, unintuitive interface. For others, it's migrating to a new app completely.

So Pocket Casts team, given that you've taken away features that we paid for and dumped this work in our laps, can we at least get a candid explanation? What were you thinking?

You might even consider apologizing to your users. Doesn't seem like the road you want to go down, but listen to the people complaining, and look at your reviews on the app stores. You spent years building up good will, and spent it literally overnight. Maybe it's time to start building it up again?