Apple Podcasts 12+

I don’t know where to begin but I have been listening and actually dancing with Sah and how I found this beautiful soul was not coincidence as I was going through my own grieving of loosing my mom. I’m just beyond grateful for these podcasts! Inspired and seen and heard that i can only say thank you for having the courage to come forward and BE that bridge for many of us. Today as I listened to this episode with Ash Canty and all her experiences as well as Sah’s experiences I was in tears of love, compassion, gratitude and kindness. I felt as if I was part of some of those experiences as well and wow it brought so much attention from the medial world as well and how little they know about the spiritual, and the body to the care of patients and the sickness is real and how ironic to say that in the health care system. I love you Sah thank you for making my morning even more aware of advocacy for mental health care and to know that even when we saw walking in this processes alone there’s humans like you willing to be a face to bring more awareness. Because without love and consciousness there’s no way to liberate and evolve as a humanity.
♾️✨🧘🏽‍♀️🤩🌈🙏🏽

While I generally find the app to be clear and easy to use, there are some critical bugs with downloads. For serial shows which have to be played in order, while the podcast creator can designate that as the intended play order, the Podcasts app doesn’t recognize it for downloads. There is no option to download the “next” set of episodes, but there is a bug with the strings. When you switch to, for example, “download 3 most recent” and then go back, the string on the outer menu is “download next 3 episodes”. You can go in and out of the menu and it will change back and forth between “next” and “most recent”. In any case, whichever you choose, it just downloads the most recent. I’m on episode 3 of a story podcast that is marked as needing to be listened to in order, and download “next/most recent 3” downloads episodes 11-13. There is simply no way to get it to download 3-5, or even just 3. This is frustrating enough that I’m deducting 2 stars. There is another flaw that has caused me to remove another star. You cannot mark a podcast series as “played up to this point”. If I’ve listened to a series on another app and am hundreds of episodes in, I can’t switch over to this app and mark those first 200 as already played. I have to do every episode manually, which is infuriating if I, again, want to listen to episodes in order.

I’ve used this legacy Apple Podcast app for at least 3 or 4yrs now. Many of the apps that come preloaded on Apple devices are basic without a lot of customizable features but still are intuitive and function well. This app however seems to have lost usability and features seem to have diminished rather than gotten better over time.
I do like the vast number of pods available in the platform and many seem to have fewer commercials than when I use them on other platforms. I also like the basic usability in that you can initially figure out how to use it without referring to instructions- or used to. Also keeping up with my library across devices is great.
BUT sometime over the past 6 months or so it seems like some of the default features have changed. The main problem I have is when an episode has finished it now seems to auto play the next PREVIOUS episode, even if it has already been played and clearly shows as ‘played’. I swear it used to go to the next UNPLAYED episode or just stop if you were up to date. Having an old episode auto play is super frustrating when you’re driving or perhaps cooking with messy hands so that you can’t just stop what you’re doing and manually select a new episode.