Leave a Review Overcast
Frequent Crashes
If this app worked as intended, it would be excellent, however it appears to have some frustrating quirks and stability issues. First and foremost are the crashes. It crashes when you pause about half the time, it crashes when you select a podcast, sometimes it just seems to crash for really no reason at all. On a typical weekday I use this app for about 2-3 hours and will see 1-2 crashes each day. The second issue is that the app will always, always try to play the previous unfinished podcast, even if you have a playlist or have a different cast selected as “play next”. For instance, the last minute of most casts is just an outro, an ad, or credits so I will skip to the next cast. If I allow a cast to play to the very end, Overcast will begin playing the last unfinished minutes of all previous casts even if I have a new cast queued. I’ve used this app for about a year and will say it is better than the native Apple app, but only just barely, owing only to Overcast’s better layout. However its stability issues and infuriating quirks hobble it badly.
Update July 2021: Even worse these days! Crashes about every 3-5 minutes. When I relaunch the app, it starts me at the beginning of the podcast, losing my place.Show lessMgfcgsgdvfxgcdgxd
Long time Apple podcast listener
Last update in June 2021 finally broke my love of apple podcast. After 17 years Apple broke own app. Battery life was horrible and phone was over heating. Been long time fan of ATP so tried the app from Marco. I love it and will go premium to say thanks for a great app l am in Australia and use podcasts to go to sleep and this apps works great. Also use when at gym Why does apples app kill my battery and get super hot. Also the search function works really well on this app. Why can’t Apple offer an easy search Thanks Marco. And my favourite podcasts is ATP.Show lessColyn53
Nice alternative to Apple’s.
I’ve been well pleased so far. It isn’t always the most intuitive, but I’ve eventually figured out how to achieve most everything I’ve wanted to. The benefits of adding a show via RSS have become immediately clear. Being a subscriber to a show and getting early access episodes and bonus material right in my podcast manager makes it so easy to stay up with all my shows. The clip function has made it so much more effective to get friends interested in shows than years of recommending downloads ever did.
The one thing that sticks out at me the most: sometimes I want to keep an episode for a while so I can go back and reference it later, however, although the episodes are marked as “played” the show doesn’t drop down to the “Played Podcasts” section. That doesn’t seem to happen until the episodes are deleted out of the library. This makes it difficult to know when a new episode is available; this show doesn’t release episodes according to a schedule, I have to randomly check to see if there’s anything new in the episode list. It feels nitpicky but it’s important to me. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I listen while I’m working. The less amount of time I have to spend poking around in menus, the better.Show lessSdKuAb
I’ve never looked back
I was very early in getting into podcasts. Actually used Stitcher before iPhone added their default app. Don’t even know how many years I’ve used Overcast now rather than the standard iPhone podcasts app but just about everything is just a little better here. Also, so many little things that don’t exist on the standard iOS app (as far as I know). Won’t list them all here but by far my favorite feature that comes to mind is the customization you can put in for number of old episodes to hold on to from each individual podcast to keep your feed clean and not eat up too much storage on shows you don’t get to as often and probably won’t anyway!
Can’t tell you how excited I was when they added offline syncing ability for podcasts to the Apple Watch app so I could listen on runs without my phone. Also, I was so pleasantly surprised to see how quickly they fixed some of the early bugs with this feature that were obnoxious. Keep up the great work Overcast I recommend your product to everyone when it comes up and even tell them how easy it is to transfer over from another app.Show lessTDisch08
Once innovative, starting to languish
Overcast is a pretty unremarkable app these days. It also gets quite buggy - search intermittently breaks.
Search doesn’t always work, and is useless for uploads.
Features like ‘smart’ playlists are actually very basic and not particularly smart.
Not sure what Stars are for? You can’t add them to a playlist (which would actually make smart playlists useful), and the only way to see them is to look through every individual podcast.
People like trimming silence, but that is available elsewhere.. (side note that silence is not the uniformly useless object people think it is, there is plenty of meaning and context that gets overlooked by trimming pauses)
Side loading audio is a great feature, but also available elsewhere.
The sharing features are admittedly great, especially clipping audio.
The privacy information is also good.
Siri Shortcuts integration is table stakes now, there’s nothing mind blowing here.
Have been a paid user since the beginning. would love to see some innovative features introduced for organising podcasts and episodes. One place to start would be to make smart playlists actually smart,Show lessIvanapinyon
Honestly, reviewing because it said in settings they would never interrupt to ask for a review
This app is the best podcast app I have used. Way better than the stock iOS podcast app and is incredibly thoughtful in its details. When you pause, it skips back a second or two so your brain can pick up where the conversation was when it resumes, and using the skip ahead buttons will adjust to land between words. It will speed up or cut out intros, and while digging through the settings I couldn’t help but notice the option in there that also informed me they wouldn’t ask for a review with a pop-up (like every other app all the time!) so it inspired me to make this review. I also noticed that with a premium subscription you can upload your own files which is perfect for listening to old radio shows I have archived but playback of a 4 hour show is nearly impossible without an app designed to handle long format talk based files, and this is going to be perfect. I didn’t realize it was an option and thought premium just took away ads. That alone isn’t worth paying for to me, but now that I saw this they are going to have a new customer.Show lessSivartVanHoo
Continuous Play? - UPDATED
EDIT - still couldn’t get Apple Podcast to work so I stuck with this awhile. I found out where continuous play is, and you have to add episodes to allow them to play or something? Still believe the app is not intuitive, and could really benefit from a touch-screen walkthrough when first installed and opened. It’s kind of ridiculous that this doesn’t already exist, given the amount of features this app seems to have. Robust application with some good features, but those features are lost to users without some kind of explainer.
Original: I’m playing catch-up on a podcast I just started listening to that has been around for two years, so there is a lot of content to get through. I used to listen to it on Apple Podcasts, but for whatever reason that app has stopped working on my phone, and after looking at reviews for Overwatch I thought I’d give this a try. If Continuous Play exists, it’s not intuitive, nor does the app seem to have a feature where it will automatically pick up where the listener left off in a show. As soon as I downloaded the app I went to Settings and toggled ‘Continuous Play’ on, but it isn’t doing anything. I’ve tried playing the podcast from the episodes pages, creating playlists (the Smart Playlist is a joke), nothing works. The app just stops after it plays whatever episode your selected. Will be troubleshooting the issues with Apple Podcast and deleting this app immediately.Show lessBrooke_92
Have to downgrade rating
The app is great, tho the creeping featurism is getting out of hand. Last one was independent settings for how episodes are displayed for each podcast. Sounds great, you say? No, because the default is the exact opposite of what anyone who is into podcasts would want. I had to go thru every subscription and change the setting manually, because there is now no way to set them all the same. But the app packs a lot of features that I really enjoy like Smart Speed which dynamically adjusts the speed of the podcast to eliminate gaps and whatnot, and Voice Boost, which boosts human voices to stand out better. In addition, you can adjust the playback speed in fairly fine increments, all while using Smart Speed and Voice Boost. It makes for a truly customized and excellent listening experience. It looks great too.
But that’s not the reason for the downgrade. No, it’s because the Watch app has gone from woefully inadequate to non-functional. It crashes nonstop, and now won’t work no matter what I do, including restarting the watch, which used to fix it. The developer really needs to hire some help, it’s obvious he doesn’t give a ratsass about the AW app. Even when it was working, it didn’t work right.Show lessThe Real Zen Boy
Apple should have hired these guys to fix their Podcast app
It is no secret that the Apple Podcasts app is a mess of unfriendly UI design and function. Overcast makes up for Apple’s failure by providing the most simple and elegant podcast solution without the absence of extra bells and whistles. Having tried a few podcast apps I can’t look past Overcast for all my Podcasting needs.Show lessSpaztian
Apple Watch app not working properly
I have used Overcast for several years now, and believe that it’s definitely one the best podcast apps available.
The only real issue that I found with the app to date has been the Apple Watch app. This has a tendency to either not download podcasts, or only partially download them. I purchased a new Apple Watch to be able to exercise without the phone. Many times, I have been able to start a podcast; however, it simply stops 10-12 minutes in. This is really the only thing preventing this from getting five stars.
I love the way that I am able to organise podcasts, the audio is incredibly clear, and the adjustable speeds for each podcast make this a brilliant app.Show lessgruntus123
