Help! I'm drowning in a sea of podcast apps!

[JaySeeDoubleYou]

Good Afternoon! Sorry in advance for this being such a long post. I did the requisite checking for an existing thread before starting this one. I didn't find anything, but wouldn't be surprised to find out one's out there and just didn't come up in the search results.

I recently just moved from iOS (iPhone5) back to Android (Galaxy Note 3). While this is not my first Android phone, it is the first time I've used one for podcasting. Back with the others, I carried a 16GB first gen iPod around with me too, and podcasted off of it. Well, with the premium the Note takes on pocket space, and with as old and buggy as that iPod is getting, and with as spoiled as I became with only having to carry around one device in the iPhone, I just really don't want to carry it around anymore. So it's time to get set up with an Android option.

But here's the problem....there are a half a million apps out there! Also problematic is that I subscribe to like 25 podcasts, all of which are audio, and all but one of which are talking, rather than music. I've come to depend on 2x speed adjust for all but that one music pod so much so that it's become a non-negotiable for me (otherwise, I could never hope to keep up with them all). So I NEED one that has that feature.

The very first one I tried, I got it, Podcast Addict! It has 2x on both downloaded and streamed, and lets me subscribe to all my shows (plus, I can set the speed for each show, so I don't have to keep messing with speed adjust when I go back and forth between the music and talking shows). It also lets me access streaming to ALL the old episodes still on the feed, while auto-downloading the most recent episode, and only keeping "hard copies" of the 10 most recent for each show. At first blush, this seemed to be the PERFECT app!......

.....until....I discovered how buggy it is. If there's more than one episode unplayed on a certain feed, then rather than auto-playing the next episode, it will usually just stop playing period, and worse, when that doesn't happen, it'll just start playing an episode from a random feed...usually a show that I've already heard. Even worse than this though, is while it thankfully doesn't crash in mid-play, it is notorious for hard crashing once a show is over, and locking up the entire phone for about two or three minutes before I can move to force close the app and open it again.

This is enough bugginess that I'm not sure Podcast Addict is a long-term sustainable option.

But the other apps I've looked into have their problems too. Doggcatcher seems rock solid, but doesn't support speed adjust. I know there's a third party app I can download that will enable this, but I hear that's REALLY problematic. Podcast Republic is attractive (and free), but is also cluttered, and most of all, doesn't support speed adjust. Pocket Casts is the best of the Podcast Addict alternatives I've explored so far, as it seems solid, stable, attractive, and best of all, supports speed adjust.....on already downloaded episodes only! Streaming? No speed adjust (same with Beyond Pod, only it seems to have a much clunkier interface.)

While the heavy majority of the podcasts I listen to will be pre-downloaded, I can think of several instances where I may refresh while out and about, and will want to listen rather than wait for the download. This may be an inconvenience worth dealing with over against an app that hard crashes all the time if my choices are only between one or the other, but still, what a pain in the botox! Hopefully Android has a better option than this rock and a hard place situation.

Anyway, to make a short story long, and then make it short again, if I need something that will be able to do 2x on both downloaded and streamed episodes, and will let me auto-download for 25 shows, keeping only the most recent ten, but I need it to be more solid and stable than Podcast Addict, what can I do, guys?

Does anyone have any reccos for me?

Thanks! Sorry for making my first inquiry so long!

 

[JaySeeDoubleYou]

So, while I still covet you guys' input as it will help put things in focus for me, and probably make the decision making process faster and easier, I've decided to sorta kinda not wait around for deal-making/breaking feedback.

I've got Podcast Addict already with all my podcasts subscribed. I went ahead and downloaded Doggcatcher, with Presto, downloaded Pocket Casts, and the lite version of BeyondPod (which automatically gives you a seven day free trial of the full version). I'll get my podcasts setup on these other services, and try them all out for a little while. I'll continue to narrow it down til I've found "the one".

Anyway, like I said, the reason I still want your feedback is it will focus me in on things that I might be slower to notice otherwise, and make this process go much faster (since I'm gonna be tying up about four times the storage space on podcasts that I normally would having them downloaded in each service.) So please lavish me with tips, facts, and sage advice!

Thanks again, guys!

 

[podcastaddict]

I'm the developer of Podcast Addict. I got a Google Alert about your post entry.
What you're describing as bugs, is the intended behavior of the app.
The playback relies on the app playlist, si if you start playing a single episode then the player will stop at the end. If you start playing multiple episodes then they will be added in the playlist in the order you add them, so when an episode playback finished it will then start playing the next one in the queue. There's nothing random about this
If you want you can order your playlist by podcasts.
Episodes are automatically removed from the playlist once listened to. Just make sure you didn't change the default behavior (Settings/Playlist).

I would really like to know where you saw that the app was notorious for crashing...
The only known crash is due to the last version of the Google Play Services. Because of their bug, there are about 1500 daily crashes. They just started rolling out a fix, so those crashes will disappear in the upcoming days.
More info about this major issue: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-admob-ads-sdk/DkjtCx_Zvn8[1-25-false]

Apps cannot freeze a device for more than 30s, after which a popup will be displayed telling you the app doesn't respond anymore and asking you if you want to wait or kill it. If you don't have such a popup and if your device id frozen for more than 30s then this is a ROM issue, not an app bug.
I can assure you that the app is pretty stable and even with those Google Play Services crashes the app is crash free for more than 99.7% of the users.

Feel free to contact me if you want more information.

 

[JaySeeDoubleYou]

Hey! Thanks for getting back to me! I am very glad to hear from you directly.

As far as the play list feature, I have figured that out in the time between my post and your reply, and that works fine. However, even since using that feature, the crashes have continued.

The screen will stop responding. All buttons besides the screen off button stop working, and once I've killed the screen, the phone will do absolutely nothing for the next maybe 3 minutes, not even the screen wake button. When the phone finally does come back, it has the podcast addict has stopped responding message.

There are absolutely no other apps on my phone which lock up the phone. P.A. is literally the only one that does anything even remotely like this.

After using the other apps, I am pleased to tell you that I like yours best...When it's working. So, if you have a fix for me, then I will cheerfully delete the others and make yours mine.

However, this level of instability is just unsustainable for me, and if it's not something we can resolve then it will cause me, with regrets, to flee to my second favorite app, Doggcatcher. Even though I'm worried about the future with the Dogg since it depends upon Presto for the speed control (and I'm concerned that one app may be updated without the other, causing them to stop playing nice.)

So yeah, please hook me up with a fix, since all else being equal, I'd sure like to go through yours!

Thank you very much for taking the time to reach out to me. If you'd prefer, please feel free to PM me instead of replying to this thread.

Cheers!

-J

 

[podcastaddict]

Thanks for getting back at me.
As explained in my past answer, the only crashes/issues are due to a major bug in the Google Play Services. If you take a look at this post: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-admob-ads-sdk/DkjtCx_Zvn8%5B1-25-false%5D
you will see that a lot of developers are having similar issues and are complaining about Google... A fix is rolling out and they just announced that the rollout will be completed on Wednesday or thursday. So it's just a matter of days before those crashes disappeared

 

[JaySeeDoubleYou]

Okay. I looked at the thread. A fair amount of it was over my head, but I think I got the most important aspects:

It seems the problem has something to do with ads, and is somehow connected to Google Play. It sounds like an update to G Play will be coming out any time now, and should automatically fix the issue with no action required on my part (other than to make sure play updates).

Do I have it right?

Also, does your ad free version also crash, or just the one with the ad bar at the bottom?

I think in the immediate short term, I'll stick with Doggcatcher til the update is in place (or until I can try the ad free version if you say that one is immune). Once the update is done (or I've upgraded), I'll try Podcast Addict again, and assuming the problem is fixed, then I'll just stick with your app from then on.

Let me know about the ad free version!

Thanks for taking the time to chat this one out with me!

Cheers!

 

[podcastaddict]

Yes Google play services are in charge of displaying the ad banner and its responsible for the crashes.

The ad free version doesn't have this issue but I don't want users to buy it because of a bug. I prefer that they buy it only if they want to.

 

[JaySeeDoubleYou]

I think that even if there had been no other reason than all the help you've been, that'd still warrant me going pro. I'll have to wait til the weekend to do it though, so I think I'll just finish up this week with "the Dogg".

Thanks!

 

[Chuck Kollars]

My own experience with Podcast Addict [February 2015] (could very well be wrong ...but):

There are a huge number of "settings" in Podcast Addict. The good news is you can configure it to behave a whole lot of different ways and probably get just what you want. The bad news is the "defaults" are almost certainly not quite right - they seem to emphasize a) working, b) the most common cases, and c) hard to screw up. BUT this means they're almost certainly suboptimal (or even just plain wrong) for a whole lot of cases that don't seem all that unusual.

The general opinion of Podcast Addict on the web seems to be "long on features, but a bit short on user-friendliness". I tend to agree. I have a _long_ history as a computer person, but almost no very recent experience, including almost no experience with smartphones. I'm distressed by what seems by my standards to be a lack of good written documentation about Podcast Addict. Whether or not this is just "typical" of most smartphone apps and I must "get over it" I don't know.

I too have experienced the lockup with the screen going blank and the device not even responding to the power on/off button. It's only happened to me once or twice in something like ten hours of fiddling though. Responsiveness eventually (sorta) returned, and I just rebooted. That was draconian and probably unnecessary, but it did work. It felt to me like the phone not really having enough memory (what we used to call "thrashing itself to death"). This seemed likely in my case since I'm a cheapskate and have an off-brand device known to have _way_ too little memory. (And trying to compensate by installing a very large SDCard does _not_help , as what matters to system operation is only the built-in memory.) This seems likely in your case too, since the 2X feature apparently takes substantial additional resources. Can you run fewer other apps at the same time?

I've just recently finally figured out how to change to "interstitial" ads, which should avoid the Google bug altogether (rather than waiting for a "fix" to it). Unfortunately that was so recently I haven't yet figured out just what difference it made. I'd like to think though that it has prevented any further lockups.