I’ve been warming up to switching to GrapheneOS for months. Last month I bought a Pixel 8 (which is the buggiest effing phone I’ve ever owned, good job Google). I’ve just been waiting to have the bandwidth.

But with Google sunsetting Google Podcasts, I’ve decided to make time next week. Podcasts are a MAJOR part of my daily functioning.

  • @[email protected]
    8•9 months ago

    I was a pocketcast user for years, switched to antennapod a few months ago. Here’s what’s bothering me:

    • Antennapod has a weird separation between new episodes (inbox) and what you’re listening to now (queue). PC has that abstracted away where you only have to check one place for your podcasts.
    • There is no simple service to sync your subscriptions and listen progress. Gpoddersync is basically abandoned and the protocol lacks features. Hopefully this will change with openpodcastAPI, but they haven’t managed to secure funding yet.
    • I’ve been spoilt by having a server doing the heavy lifting of refreshing my podcasts. It’s a minor annoyance that I need to wait approx. 1.5 second per feed to refresh. It’s just the way it is.

    There are also things that antennapod does better:

    • chapters actually works in AP.
    • episode pictures also works in AP, PC only showed the static image of the feed.
    • search is just as good as PC.
    • its FOSS and hopefully resistant to enshittification (unless all producers go into a closed ecosystem like Spotify tried with their recent purchases of pod-studios).

    Best of luck from another pod-nerd.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•9 months ago

      I’ve been spoilt by having a server doing the heavy lifting of refreshing my podcasts. It’s a minor annoyance that I need to wait approx. 1.5 second per feed to refresh. It’s just the way it is.

      In the podcast settings for each podcast, does “Keep Updated” not handle this for you? I don’t think I ever manually refresh my podcasts. Apologies if I’m misunderstanding.

      Antennapod has a weird separation between new episodes (inbox) and what you’re listening to now (queue). PC has that abstracted away where you only have to check one place for your podcasts.

      I don’t like the queue myself, though possibly for different reasons than you. Again possibly misunderstanding your concern, but I have “Enqueue Downloaded” and “Continuous Playback” both disabled in the Antennapod settings, and I just pretend the queue doesn’t exist.

      Just throwing those things out there in the hopes they may help.

      • @[email protected]
        3•9 months ago

        You’re actually understanding my issues quite well 🙂

        The “keep updated” works, but I try to keep it to twice a day to have my battery last longer. So I manually trigger in-between. It’s a natural consequence of the technical choice, really.

        As for the “Enqueue downloaded”, I stream everything as I have a massive mobile data plan. Due to this, I can stream a lot but I still have to deal with a separation between inbox/queue.

        Thanks for those suggestions, I’m sure they’ll be of help for others that’s not part of my edge case 😁