Leave a Review iCatcher! Podcast Player
Excellent, Usable, Tweakable
I’ve been using iCatcher for a few years now and nothing else compares. If you listen to podcasts at home, while driving, while on construction sites, while wearing gloves, while at a desk, with full attention and peripherally, this is the tool that lets you use deep tweaks and on-the-fly nudges to make playing podcasts an addition to your day rather than a distraction.
Leave all the default settings and it's as good as any other player. When the major irritations of podcast apps are too much and you have a few minutes, poke around the settings and tweak them away: Oh! I can have podcasts sorted, sure, but tell it to nudge this one a little higher so it floats to the top. Oh! Delete after listening, but wait an hour first so if I was distracted I can go back. Notifications, or not. Always skip the last thirty seconds of this one, the first ten of that one. In-app descriptions of the rich configuration choices are concise and helpful. Joy.
I feel a need to list a complaint, just to make this review believable. Okay: I have had the app crash, maybe once a week. But, testament to its fundamental stability, I just open it again and there's no data lost, it's good too go: fails gracefully when it fails.
Five stars, happy to keep using, you ought to use it too.Show lessKrimpman
Developer Response
Thank youMy Favorite Podcast App
I have tried several different podcast apps, and this one is heads-and-shoulders above the others. I love how flexible and customizable it is. (If I had one wish, there would be a single button I could use during playback to save a particular message while it’s playing, so it wouldn’t be automatically deleted afterward. Otherwise, when driving, I have to stop playback until I can pull over, Bookmark the message, Lock it, and Add it to a Playlist that Saves Messages after Playback. (I want 99% of my messages to be deleted once I’ve heard them - just a handful would need the ability to be marked and saved for later.).Show less'W
Great podcast player!
iCatcher! has been my podcast app for many years and I continue to think it’s the best thing around. The swipe gestures are the only way to fly … swipe up for faster playback, down for back to 1x. 1 finger swipe sideways does a 30 second skip, 2 finger side swipe 15 seconds all with customizable times. You can set what happens with numbers of episodes downloaded, or left over after listening… and everything just works. I’ve tried to use other apps - and I just keep coming back. If you need responsive controls - buy this app!Show lessZ3000
So powerful it should easily be the top podcatcher app.
I’m a podcast fanatic and have tried almost every podcast app out there. (Except for ones which require accounts) So far none of them have touched iCatcher’s functionality - esp if you’re a power user. Because it’s so deeply configurable.
Just looking at playlists - you can create automated playlists based on combinations of almost any parameter you can think of (e.g. podcast, episode, priority, bookmark, keywords, played status, download status, subscribed status, date, last unplayed...). The playlist sort functionality is equally powerful. The whole app feels so thoughtfully and carefully designed.
My only problem with it is, after using it so long I have such a large list of podcasts and playlists, that the app has slowed down a lot. However I’ve tried exporting the large OPML into other podcast apps and they all perform either as slowly or worse than ICatcher.Show lessAnnoyed167346
So easy!
Since I am fairly new to podcasts, I was searching for an easy app to use. I tried out a few but kept coming back to iCatcher.
I mainly listen to musical podcasts for exercising. It’s so easy to set up playlists, search for new podcasts, download for offline listening, sync with iCloud, email myself backups, constantly updating-I could go on and on. But to me the most important is customer service. Joe has responded quickly to me everytime I needed help. How much do you find that anymore!
Update:I recently had a problem with the latest update. I wrote Joe and he was immediately on it and he kept in touch until he found a solution. He really cares!Show lessposs727
Best Podcast App
I love this podcast app. Way better than the apple built one. It has so many features and the developer has made it so stable over the years. He also updates as soon as there is a new os and new screen size. When I got my iPhone X, lots of high profile apps took forever to update for the screen but this app was updated before I even got the phone in. One thing I appreciate is that the app developer so far doesn’t limit what podcasts you can find and subscribe to. I find it kind of ridiculous that Apple can “delist” podcasts from their app. A podcast is just an RSS feed, a URL basically. The podcast app is a specialized web browser for finding and subscribing to RSS feeds. I wonder if Apple is planning to make changes to Safari so that it can’t go to certain websites. I don’t need Apple to tell me what content to listen to. Hopefully Joe agrees with this and keeps his app open and honest. Thank you sir for making such a great product.Show lessshizzaq
Great playlist features
I went through a ton of podcast apps trying to find one with the playlist features I needed, until I found this one and decided to take a chance on it.
Key playlist features (for me):
Ability to make static playlists of episodes where the episodes remain on the playlist even after they are played.
Ability to create a playlist that filters by keyword, for example to have all episodes of a podcast with a certain word in the title. This one is extremely useful, especially for the actual play podcasts I listen to that can have multiple campaigns running simultaneously in the same feed. The only improvement here I can think of is slightly more advanced filtering, currently you can have multiple keywords to create an OR filter, the option to create an AND filter or exclude episodes from the playlist by keyword would be nice, but what this has is already something that’s made creating the playlists so much easier. You can also select individual episodes to include or exclude for cases your filter doesn’t quite handle right.
The only feature I’d like that’s missing is the ability to have the display order be newest first but the play order be oldest first, however the playlist feature have made this much less necessary for me.Show lessFuzztip
Good customization options but misses key elements
This a good podcast app with many customization options, in fact too many, which can be confusing. It would be my go to app for podcasts if it had a Play Next queue that you could organize. Without it, you are limited to playing podcast episodes from playlists, or one episode at a time from the podcast subscription.
I also find it confusing the way it adds all downloaded episodes when you create a new playlist, before you select the podcasts you want to include in the playlist, its not intuitive. If they improve these areas, this could be the best podcast app right now, it has some other nice features, like the well designed use of gestures to handle playback.Show lessDon Gama
Annoying New Issue
***Newest update unfortunately has not fixed the issue. Still exactly the same as it was...appreciate it being addressed, even if it’s still a problem at current.
Attempting to drag and drop within a playlist to change the order of episodes appears to now be broken... it exits the app and sends you back to the iPhone menu... or it simply puts the item you just dragged and dropped back where it was and won’t change anything. This is hugely frustrating and has just begun happening over the past month.
One addition I would love to see added is for an option for episodes to begin at the first bookmark rather than the start...I bookmark the beginning of main content to try and avoid the ads or the fluff I’m not interested in, and it would be great to have the app immediately go to my bookmark when each new episode begins.
I’ve used iCatcher for several years and it will always be my go to... each problem (or which there have been very few) gets resolved quickly. I have no doubts that will happen again and I will bump back to five stars.Show lessJMartRadio
I wish I could give it six stars
After sampling and buying essentially every podcast app that there,... I was ready to give up. They all made my head hurt. I work in a highly technical field and have no problem with advanced options, but the organization of the other podcast apps made me wonder if anyone could use these efficiently. Just when I was ready to give up I heard about iCatcher. What a difference! Finally I can navigate the app and do exactly what I want to do, organize and listen, without a painfully disheveled interface. Thank you to the developer for producing such an elegant app.Show lessHanson24
