Spotify Podcasts should be a separate App

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Over the years I’ve tried lots of different great podcast player apps. I was an avid Overcast user but I’ve recently gotten in to Castro.

The reason I like Castro is because the UX has been designed for my User story - I subscribe to heaps of podcast feeds but am selective about which ones I actually listen to. Castro lets me quickly queue up the episodes I’m interested in and archive the rest. Overcast had really nice queuing functionality as well.

Both of these apps have been carefully designed for the podcast listening experience. You know what hasn’t been carefully designed? Spotify shoving their podcast offering in to their existing music player app.

I love listening to music, I love listening to podcasts. I do these activities in different contexts. When I’m ready to hit “resume” on my podcast queue, I want that to be simple and easy. Same with music. What I don’t want is the same “queue” and “player” for these two types of content. No! No no no!

When I want to open my podcast app to look at the newest podcasts available I don’t want to see music! When I open my music app to find a playlist to work to I don’t want to see podcasts. Different. Content. For. Different. Contexts.

In the blessed pre-Spotify Podcasts days, I was a huge Spotify fan. I was paying for a subscription as soon as it was available in my region. Now I curse Spotify whenever they take away podcast content I previously enjoyed: Brené Brown, basically all of Gimlet. I say “take away” because I refuse to use their shitty excuse for a podcast-app-shoved-in-a-music-player that has made my once-great-music-player experience worse! Damn you Spotify, I won’t do it.