Instacast → Downcast

Listening to podcasts through the iPhone Music app was frustrating. I was very happy when I bought Instacast, which made it a pleasure. I never shared most of the complaints others had about Instacast. In fact, I didn’t like some of the changes they made to address those concerns.

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I don’t believe the people behind Instacast intended to be unfair to their customers. I believe that they simply made some mistakes and rectifying those mistakes required doing things that were unfair to their existing customers.

Good intentions, however, doesn’t change the fact that they did make mistakes, and one consequence of those mistakes is that this customer is checking out the competition rather than upgrading.

As with Instacast, I don’t share most of the complaints I read about Apple’s Podcasts app. Digging a little deeper, though, it seems that beyond those surface complaints, it is just as buggy as listening to podcasts through the Music app used to be.

While a few other podcast client apps get some love, it seems that Downcast is the most popular among people whose opinion I value. So, that’s what I’m trying. Exporting my list of subscriptions from Instacast to Downcast was ridiculously easy. The challenge was getting episodes other than the most recent from each feed marked as unplayed in Downcast. I’d have to flip over to Instacast, check which episodes I hadn’t listened to, and then flip back to Downcast to...

Well, it took me a while to figure out the next bit. You don’t so much mark an episode as unplayed as queue it for download or streaming.