Tag: pocket casts

From Overcast to Castro: A Podcast App Journey

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I listen to a lot of podcasts.

Over the years, I’ve used just about every podcast app worth trying, but for a long time, Overcast was my go-to. One of the big features that kept me there was the “priority” system, which pushed your favorite shows to the top of the queue automatically. It helped manage the chaos.

That feature stopped working reliably around the time of Overcast’s big rewrite in 2024. I kept using it for a while, hoping things would improve, but they never really did. At one point I removed all of the prioritization settings to simplify things, but that only made the experience worse.

So I started looking around.

I gave Pocket Casts a try, and to its credit, it was mostly great. Filters were powerful, syncing worked well across devices, and the UI was clean and dependable. But over time, I missed the triage-style listening flow I was used to. Neither Overcast nor Pocket Casts really delivered that anymore. I tried to rig up my own system which was mostly really solid, but it just wasn’t the right fit for me.

That’s when I decided to give Castro another look.

Castro was acquired by new developers in 2024, and the app has seen a real resurgence since then. Long-standing bugs and edge case issues have been addressed, and the core experience that made Castro compelling in the first place has stayed intact.

What I’ve always appreciated about Castro is its Inbox and Queue system. You can subscribe to your favorite shows, but new episodes don’t go straight into your Up Next list unless you want them to. Instead, they show up in an inbox for review. This makes it easy to be intentional about what I listen to. You can also push important episodes to the top of your queue, which gives me back the control I lost when Overcast’s system broke.

And while it’s not the most important thing for a podcast app, Castro is the best looking option in my opinion. The typography, layout, and color choices are all more thoughtful than the competition. You don’t spend a lot of time inside the app once you hit play, but good design still matters, and Castro gets it right. The voice boost and trim silence features aren’t quite as good as Overcast in my experience, but it’s all still there.

For now, Castro is the podcast app that best fits how I want to listen. Unless something major changes, I’m planning to stick with it. The yearly subscription is $25 instead of $15, but it’s being actively developed at a clip much greater than what I’ve seen in Overcast-land.

Using Pocket Casts Filters

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A few weeks ago, a big Overcast update shipped and while I was mostly happy with it, I did find myself poking around Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Castro while I was waiting for the showstopper bugs to be addressed.

I’m no stranger to Pocket Casts – I’ve been using it on and off for over a decade due to it’s cross-platform nature, customization and great user interface. I love that I can play my queue on my Sonos speakers, on my phone, the web and really any device under the sun. However, out of the box it suffers from some of the same challenges that Overcast has when it comes to queue management. Listening to a handful of podcasts is pretty easy, but if you subscribe to a number of shows that you only selectively listen to, the noise can become an issue.

Castro’s got a great queue system where you’re presented with an inbox that you go through, adding to your list or deleting. It’s intuitive, fast and it learns from your habits. That got me thinking about if I could use the filtering system that Pocket Casts has to set up something similar. After a little bit of fiddling, I’ve mostly nailed it.

Setting up queue management in Pocket Casts

First up, I automatically add all of my favorite podcasts to ‘Up Next’, which is what Pocket Casts calls their queue, and have items in this list download by default. This is a per-podcast setting that you can edit.

I then created a new playlist of podcasts released in the past 2 weeks that I call “Inbox”, sorted by newest episode at the top. However, it does not show any podcasts that have been played or downloaded. That way, as soon as it’s added to Up Next and downloaded, it falls off this list.

Finally, I changed a global setting to automatically archive any podcast over 3 months old. That way, even if I don’t mess with the “Inbox” playlist and only play stuff that is auto-added to my Up Next queue, those old episodes will filter out eventually.

With this setup in place, I’m able to subscribe to all of the podcasts I enjoy and have the my must-listens automatically added to Up Next. The one thing I wish Pocket Casts allowed for is more customization of swipe actions. If it did, I could then quickly swipe away podcasts from the list to archive, or add to Up Next in the other direction. There are ways to accomplish this with other apps, but it is super intuitive with the powerful filtering system that Pocket Casts provides. If you haven’t tried the app in a while or at all, I highly recommend it.