A while ago I tried out all the android podcast apps I could find and settled on BeyondPod. Overall it’s pretty good but there’s a few niggling bugs I don’t like. My girlfriend would like to get into listening to podcasts at work and I’m not 100% sure I want to recommend BeyondPod to her without re-checking the competition. Ease of use and a minimal requirement for library-maintenance are primary concerns. So with that in mind, let’s get started.
I did a quick search on Appbrain for podcast catchers and jotted down anything that looked promising. The process of trying some of these apps out is going to be hampered by the ridiculous new 15 minute android market return policy, but I’ll do my best to give them a good going-through when I can.
DoggCatcher bills itself as “the premier podcatcher for Android devices” and there’s plenty of reasons to believe them. Paying $7 off the bat with no free trial version (and the afore-mentioned 15 minute window) is a bit of a stumbling block. But plenty of people have taken the plunge and a lot of them seem happy. Looking over the feature list on their site I see plenty I like: automatic podcast cleanup, automatic playlist, highly configurable, and frequent updates.
I finally bit the bullet to try DoggCatcher. The 15 minute window is really a pain in the ass here. I’ve had the app for about 9 minutes and so far i’ve managed to download 55% of the most recent Car Talk episode.
The UI is amazing. It looks really slick and has a sort of intuitiveness that BeyondPod lacks. I really like the minimum number of screens you have to wade through to get into the media player. There’s just a Feeds screen and a Downloads screen. Oh, and there’s playback controls on the bottom of both of them. Nice.
The Add a Podcast menu is great. There’s a nice scrolling menu of all your options including several podcast directories, recommendations, youtube, NPR, a direct RSS feed entry, OPML/XML import, and more.
The Playing screen is sort of hidden. On the main screen there are tabs for audio, video, news, and a filter. I assumed these were just filters for the feeds shown. Actually they wisk you away to a player for that type of media.
There’s no real playlist management to speak of. On the audio playing screen you can choose to sort by feed and then date, or just date. I actually like that. BeyondPod, my current player, has a very flexible playlist setup, but it’s kind of a pain to have to design a playlist and manually change the order when all I really want to do is play all my podcasts, oldest to newest. If you really need to rearrange your playlist, you can do it by long-pressing on an item and moving it.
There’s a 4×1 playback widget (4 icons wide, 1 tall) to control playback from the home screen. Pretty standard faire.
One pain point is that after I added a podcast it took a bit to figure out how to actually get it to download the podcasts. By default Doggcatcher is set to not download anything. I can understand not wanting to waste space, but really, isn’t downloading podcasts the point? In the settings you can specify how many podcasts to download by default. You can also specify per-feed. But you have to go look for the setting.
I guess I’m going to give DoggCatcher a bit of a longer workout. I really like it. Well, also I went over Google’s new 15 minute trial window. D’oh! Seriously Google, 15 minutes? what the hell. But really, I do like it.
This looks pretty rough. The spelling errors on the description page notwithstanding (the author appears to be a non-native speaker, so I can cut him some slack), it appears to be rather feature-poor. The changelog shows a lot of activity, so that’s promising.
Aside from the obtuse engrish in the interface, it looks clean with nice icons. I don’t like the options for downloaded podcast deletion (At least I think deletion, it’s called ‘expiration’ in the UI). The shortest I can set a played file to stick around is 2 hours. The longest I can set an unplayed file to stick around is 1 month, which isn’t long enough for those of us who like to catch up on new podcasts from the beginning. I have no idea what setting the expiration on undownloaded files means. You need to specify that the podcasts should be downloaded for each podcast you add after you’ve added it. I don’t really understand that. Why am I adding this podcast if I don’t want to download it?
Hapi Podcast lets you import/export OPML files which is great for those of us migrating from other podcast managers.
The UI is inconsistent in its implementation of standard Android UI elements. For example, on the main screen the menu button does nothing. The settings menu is right in the main screen instead. Sure, putting things out in the open is nice, but ignoring UI conventions isn’t. It should be in the menu too.
I can’t recommend this one right now. Maybe in a while after the developer has had some time to add features and to localize it into English a bit more.
The UI looks a bit cluttered but it is made by the guys behind Androlib so it’s probably worth a shot.
The App is named with a period at the beginning so it shows up first in your App drawer. Sure it’s cute, but do we really want app developers clogging our screens up with “…………..My App” in a ridiculous analogue to the “AAAA towing” phonebook phenomenon?
Podkast wants to stream podcasts by default and the only way I can see to download a particular podcast episode is to tap the disk icon while listening. That alone disqualifies it for me; I don’t want to have my data connection up and running all day long. Also there doesn’t seem to be a way to create a playlist, either automatically or manually. You must simply listen to an episode and then choose another one. Not very good for long listening sessions like a commute or while working.
The app loves to pollute my notification bar with spam too. I don’t care about the latest news from Magma Mobile (the developers). I tried PodKast because I figured the creators of a popular android website couldn’t be too bad. And now I’ve changed my mind about them.
BeyondPod is free for 7 days, and then $7 thereafter. The way BP gets around Google’s 15 minute trial window is that BP itself is a free download. After 7 days it will stop working. There is a separate app you have to download which is just an unlock key. Once you get that BeyondPod works again. It’s a nifty tactic that several app developers use. I hope more move over to that model.
I paid my $7 for beyondpod quite a while ago. It had the best feature set at the time and has grown. Perhaps not as fast as the competition; it doesn’t see updates very frequently. There is an active google-groups for it, and I posted a question to it just now so we’ll see how fast the response is there.
As far as usage go, it provides a decent UI. Having to swipe back and forth between the various categories, feeds, items, podcasts, and finally the player is a bit much, though. When opening BeyondPod the wait during the “Loading Feeds” screen is excessive. I’m not sure what it’s loading, but couldn’t it just dump me into the player and load that in the background?
There’s a 4×1 playback widget for your home screen. I don’t use it because it has the same problem as the main UI; when you hit the play button for the first time it has to wait 5-10 seconds while it loads up all your feeds when all you really want is to play a podcast. That’s not worth 4 icons’ worth of space to me. I just have the regular app icon to open up BP’s regular UI.
I recently started using Tasker on my phone. It’s a tool which lets you automate a lot of things. Anyhow, BeyondPod has a plugin for tasker which allows you to directly control it. So, for example, I set tasker up to start BP playing my playlist at 6:34 a.m. monday through friday. That’s pretty nice.
Update: During the few days I’ve been working on this article BeyondPod came out with a couple of updates. The first made the Now Playing UI look nice and modern-androidy and a few video features I’ll never use. The second fixed some bugs introduced in the first one. And I still have some bugs with it not responding. The great news is the developer is very responsive on the beyondpod google groups. I don’t think my problem is indicative of problems for “normal” users who are running the version of android supplied for their phone.
Warning, Android nerdery ahead!
His hunch is that the latest version of his app is compiled against the Android 2.3 SDK and that it’s somehow not working with 3rd-party ROMs (myself and another user who reported bugs are running Cyanogenmod 6.1.2). He compiled a version against the Android 2.2 SDK and gave us a link to the APK. So far it’s been working fine for me, but I’ve only had it for a day or so. I’m going to keep him updated of how it’s going.
Android nerdery over. On to the next victim!
“Car Cast is a simple podcast downloader/player” says the website, and I have to agree. It offers no automatic downloading, no automatic media management, and doesn’t seem to be able to load feeds which aren’t in its search database. I’m going to recommend a skip on this one.
The developer unabashedly claims his app’s UI isn’t very good, but it’s got a lot of unique features. The player screen is very cluttered by the dual playback feature (you can listen to a podcast and music at the same time for some insane reason). It does offer a cool web-based control system so you can remote control your podcast playback via computer. The idea here is that you’d have your phone plugged into the stereo and maybe you’re across the room at your computer and want to change tracks.
It also allows you to add RSS feeds straight from your computer with this mechanism. Though, I have to add, that feature can be had with other properly developed podcast players (such as beyondpod) via chrometophone, foxtophone, etc.
I do like that you can configure your media storage based on free space; i.e. you can tell MyPOD to only use up a certain amount of space or you can tell it to always leave a certain amount of free space. Neat.
Given the garish and clunky UI and the fact that your average podcast listener (I assume my girlfriend will be one of those) won’t use the web UI or dual-player features, I’m going to recommend a pass on this one too.
Apparently this app is a big deal in the Blackberry world. Note that you can get a 30 day free trial by visiting their official website linked above.
This thing is insanely configurable. I do like the addition of a wake timer; something beyondpod lacks. The UI is spartan as all get-out. It’s just white text on a black background with little to no flourishes save a consistent header. I really like it. It’s responsive and though the settings menu is a daunting list of buttons I find the rest of the UI pleasingly simple.
Having finally downloaded an episode of a podcast (damn me for listening to long shows) I finally see the downside of the simple UI. The playing screen is atrocious. The buttons are labeled with characters rather than pictures, e.g. “<<” rather than a rewind icon. The menu has two stop entries; I can’t tell what the difference is, nor why they’d be in there anyhow. There’s also a “Fix Player” entry. No idea what that’s for. I don’t see a way to automatically enqueue episodes either.
These downsides are unfortunate. I was ready out of the gates to lambaste PodTrapper for costing $8 and sucking royally. The truth is it doesn’t suck. I really like the UI and the mega-customizability. I really really want to love this app. The bad UI in the player and apparent lack of automatic playlist creation is what does it in for me. Maybe in a couple more versions they’ll have that sewn up.
Since you can get a 30 day trial at their website I say go give it a shot. Maybe you’ll love the UI as much as I do and can forgive the player screen.
I tried this out a while back and found it lacking a lot of features I consider must-have. It seems to have gone through a few iterations since then so another shot is warranted.
There isn’t an option to automatically make a playlist; you have to manually queue individual podcast episodes to be listened to. That’s a big red mark for my usage, and I imagine for people who listen to more than a few podcasts. I’m not sure what Listen does when I’ve listened to a podcast (does it stick around forever? Delete it? How does it know when to delete them?) so I’m not sure I can trust it as my podcasting app.
I do like the simplicity of the UI (though I fear much of that simplicity is bought at the cost of features). I also like the integration with Google Reader; the idea of managing my podcast subscriptions along with my reader subscriptions on my desktop computer is tempting. Ultimately, though, I imagine this will be good in a few iterations but right now so soon after launch it’s going to have to be a pass.
If you actually want to listen to podcasts instead of dabbling you’ve got 2 options. BeyondPod and Doggcatcher. As a total Google fanboy, I’d love to recommend Listen, but it just isn’t complete as far as I’m concerned.
Beyondpod is an app tweaker’s paradise. Just about every setting I would ever want to tweak is in there, as well as Tasker integration (Doggcatcher doesn’t have direct Tasker integration yet. It’s on his agenda to add, though). That flexibility is a hinderence, though. I don’t think most people will zealously organize their podcasts into dozens of categories with independent (but non overlapping!) update schedules. And when you don’t do that, you just end up lumping everything into one category, as I did. Every podcast is Entertainment to me! So I have a totally useless screen (the category screen) and a lot of places it shows the podcast’s category, wasting the space. While I use BP’s SmartPlay feature (to manually setup my playlist), I don’t think it’s really necessary. I’d much rather just have it play them all in order. Needing 5-15 seconds to start up (or longer, yikes) and then having to navigate 2-3 pages to actually get to the part where I can hit play is a bit much.
Doggcatcher feels much more responsive than BeyondPod. The UI is much cleaner because unneeded features like categories and a nitpicky playlist management interface just aren’t there. When I hit the play button on the widget or start the application up directly I hear my podcasts right away. It pains me to say it, but after using BP for quite a while that sort of speed feels like a feature.
Both BeyondPod and Doggcatcher feature OPML import/export and each can play the files on your SDcard as though they were a podcast. That makes the process of migrating from one to the other less painful; I can set up Doggcatcher with the podcasts from BP and then queue up my unlistened podcasts from my sdcard. Or vice versa.
Do this: Go to the android market and download BeyondPod. It is a 7 day free trial and $7 after that. Try it out for a few days. If you’re not 100% in love, download Doggcatcher. You have to pay $7 up front, but I bet you’ll decide you like it within the 15 minute trial.
As for me, I’m switching to Doggcatcher.
Pingback: Tweets that mention Story Time With Keith » Blog Archive » Android Podcast Apps -- Topsy.com