Find The Best Podcast App for You

Links from the Episode:

• Grab my guide to finding a podcast you’ll love
• Apple Podcasts
• Good Pods
• Overcast
• Spotify
• Storitopia
• Pocket Casts

Apple Podcasts

I’m starting with Apple Podcasts, because it’s one of the most common podcast apps.

The Pros of the Apple podcasts app are:

• If you’re an iPhone user, it’s already on your phone, so you don’t even have to download a new app.
• Almost all podcasts are on Apple Podcasts, so you can listen to your shows all in one spot.
• You can create “stations” within the app. So if you usually listen to a group of shows together, like morning news shows you can put them all in a station, call it something like “Morning News” and you can ask siri to play that station for you every morning. This feature is under the Library section. If you tap on the Edit button, you’ll see the New Station option. If you want to set up stations, but you’re having trouble DM me on Instagram and I can walk you through it.

There are curated playlists that’ll give you other shows that you may enjoy.

Some of the not so great parts of apple podcasts are:

• Syncing playback position and unplayed episodes across devices, like from your iPhone to your Apple Watch or your desktop is a bit of a struggle on Apple Podcasts.
• The number of podcasts on the home screen can be overwhelming.
• This app is not good for android users.
• It seems to constantly be changing and I got sick of having to adapt to every change they made.

Good Pods

A podcast you may not have heard of before is called, Good Pods.

Some of the benefits of Good Pods are:

• You can follow other users to see what podcasts and episodes they’re listening to
• You can leave comments/ratings/reviews on individual episodes.
• You can make podcasting groups that other users can follow or join, I’m considering making an FPG group for us all to be a part of over there!
• It’s ‘Top 100 Shows’ sections can be toggled to show only indie podcasts, which I think is pretty cool as a an indie podcast host

The main downside to this app is that it’s still gaining popularity, so all of your friends probably aren’t using Good Pods yet, so it’s still on the journey of reaching its full potential as the podcast social media app that it’s capable of becoming.

Overcast

The main podcast app I use right now is Overcast.

Some of my favorite parts of Overcast are:

• Smart speed, which is a tool that shortens silences in talk shows, so if you want to save some time listening to certain podcasts, but you don’t want the sound distortion that comes from listening to it at 2x speed, the conversation will sound natural, but you’ll still save time. All of your shows will be shorter, but you likely won’t be able to tell any difference in the listening quality.
• The design of the app is simple, but not boring. I can easily navigate the app without pushing a bunch of buttons or going through several screens to find the podcast or playlist that I’m looking for.
• My favorite part of Overcast is how easy it is for me to create playlists and curate them to be exactly what I want. I can easily have every new episode upload to a certain playlist, or if I’m trying out a new podcast I can just add a couple episodes to the playlist without much effort at all.

One thing that may be a turn off for some podcast listeners is that on Overcast there are no curated lists of podcasts to try, except for an ad at the bottom of the screen. So, if you use your podcast app to find new podcasts this may not be the right app for you.

Guide to Finding a Podcast You’ll Love

Before I tell you about more podcast apps we’re going to take a quick break to talk about my free guide to find a podcast you’ll love. There are so many podcasts out there and it can be overwhelming to try and find one that you are going to like. My guide has 9 different types of podcasts, like history, parenting, and health and wellness and under each type of podcasts there are links to 3 different shows. That’s 27 podcasts for you to choose from. If you try a couple and you don’t like any of them I put my email at the bottom of the guide, so you can get in touch with me and I will personally help you find a podcast you will love! 

Spotify

The other app that many people use to listen to podcasts is Spotify.

Some of the benefits of Spotify are:

• If you use Spotify to listen to your music, it can be nice to have all of your listening stuff in one spot
• Spotify has podcasts that are exclusive to their app including, Brene Brown’s podcasts, Heavyweight, Science Vs and Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd.
• Speed can be adjusted by decimal points, so you can get super specific about exactly how much faster you want the podcast to speed up.

The main downside of Spotify is that it costs money or else they have added ads. It costs $10 per month or $16 per month for a family plan that includes 6 accounts. When you pay this you get everything Spotify has to offer including music, podcasts and audiobooks.

Storitopia

Y’all know that I love kid podcasts, so I had to add a podcast app specifically for kid podcasts, it’s called Storitopia.

Some of the great parts of Storitopia are:

• All of the podcasts have been vetted so you know that they are okay for your kids to listen to
• New kid podcasts are being added regularly
• All of your kids can have their own profile on the app, so they can go straight to their favorite podcasts instead of getting frustrated searching through a long list of podcasts
• There is a playlist builder which helps you and your kids easily find and create custom playlists of the podcasts that your kids will enjoy including genres like animals and nature, comedy, mystery, and music and meditation.

Some of the cons of Storitopia are:

• It can feel slightly overwhelming at the beginning, just because of all of the podcast options you have
• This app is newer, so there are still a few bugs, but the people behind the app are open to your suggestions and are constantly improving the app

Pocket Casts

The last app for today is called Pocket Casts.

Some of the advantages of using Pocket Casts are:

• It’s easy to customize
• Just like Spotify, you can turn speed up or down by the decimal point
• There’s a feature called Trim silence, which is similar to smart speed on Overcast, you can make podcast episodes shorter by getting rid of the silence in conversations
• There’s a “filters” section where you can see just the newly released episodes of podcasts you subscribe to or only the episodes that you are currently in the middle of, so that you can easily get back to listening to whatever you want
• Also there’s an easy option to cast your podcast directly from the app to your other smart devices like a speaker or TV

The main downside of Pocket Casts is that you can’t make playlists. I live and breathe by my podcast playlists, which is one of the main reasons I don’t use Pocket Casts regularly.