The best podcast app for the iPhone

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Podcasts are more popular than ever thanks to cultural sensations like Serial, but how are you supposed to listen to them? Apple’s own Podcasts app got off to a rough begin and isn’t the best choice. But for years now, outside developers have been packing the gap and producing stellar podcast apps with a ton of useful features. Which one you pick can say just as much about you as the shows you’re subscribed to.

At a nude minimum, these apps should help you find fresh podcasts that match your tastes, and eliminate all the hassle from subscribing, downloading fresh gigs, and making playlists for your commute or wherever it is you do your listening. But the best of the bunch go far beyond these basics and add other perks that can save you time, improve audio quality, and more. There are dozens of podcasts apps to choose on iOS, and whittling down the list can be difficult. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one best pick.

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The Winner

Overcast

If you’ve got an iPhone, the best podcast app is Overcast. It’s got a clean, straightforward, and tasteful design that’s effortless to use and never gets in the way of what’s most significant: the listening practice. Even better, it has some truly nice features which substantially improve that practice.

Wise Speed gets rid of silent moments and dead air wherever they exist in your podcasts, and this can significantly cut down the overall playing time. It saves you precious minutes and eventually hours; when you check Overcast’s settings menu to see exactly how much time; you’ll certainly be astonished. Another feature, Voice Boost, normalizes the volume on both completes of a conversation so no one is too noisy or too quiet. Podcasts aren’t always created equal when it comes to production values, so this can be a big help in sparing your ears. If you’re the type who chooses listening to your shows sped up, Overcast’s audio engine produces the most natural-sounding results we’ve heard. Whereas some other players can make it all too visible that you’re manipulating speed, Overcast manages to play shows quicker without sacrificing quality.

Power users can build playlists with custom-made wise filters, configure preferences on a show-by-show basis, or set a sleep timer if you’re listening to a podcast before dozing off at night. And when it comes to discovering fresh shows, Overcast will pull in recommendations from Twitter, and it also groups fresh podcasts and established hits into helpful “starter kits” that you can subscribe to with a single tap.

The only real limitation of Overcast is that you can’t stream podcasts on the fly; the entire gig must be downloaded before you hit the play button. This can be frustrating at times, but also ensures you won’t be bothered with unexpected pauses or buffering. The app is available on iPhone and iPad, and there’s also a barebones web player available for your laptop. Overcast also features one of the best Apple Witness apps we’ve seen yet. With it, you can quickly begin playing a fresh demonstrate from your wrist, recommend an gig, and access settings for Clever Speed and Voice Boost. Paired with Apple’s Now Playing glance, it’s a pretty convenient setup.

You might be able to get by with the free version of Overcast, but we wholeheartedly recommend paying $Four.99 to unlock its utter feature set. It’s been consistently updated since it launched last year, and you can expect support to last long into the future. That’s not something we can say for every podcast app in the App Store.

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