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 gave up on the iOS podcast ecosystem 5+ years ago; at that time I tried 10+ different podcasts apps and none of them had very good support for creating different categories and having podcasts from one category play before podcasts from a different one. I am pleased to report that the situation is greatly improved! This app, Overcast, lets me create one playlist for current events, my favorite shows, and other podcasts that I want to prioritize. Then I have separate playlists for categories such as tech, exmormon, and gaming. Within each playlist I can mark a show as “high priority” or “low priority” in order to have that shows episodes sorted to the top or bottom of that particular list. I can even have one podcast included in multiple playlists. This very nearly reaches feature parity with the Android-only “Podcast Addict” app. That app would let me assign a priority level to each show (a number from 1-100), then automatically play the highest priority episode from the highest priority show. By creating separate playlists Overcast very nearly lets me do the same thing. The main difference with Overcast is that I have to manually switch between playlists, whereas with Podcast Addict whenever a new episode from a higher priority podcast was released, it would automatically play that episode next.

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.