Thinking about switching to Android.

In My Humble Opinion
1

The truth is, I mostly use my phone for two things. 1) Making and receiving phone calls and 2) podcasts. Actually, now that I think about it, three things. 3) Having the internet in my pocket. Oh, and 4) playing cribbage. I am so cribbage-nutty these days. And now that I actually sort of pay attention to and think about my plays, I suck somewhat less.

Anyway, the thing here is podcasts. There are podcasts on my phone. There are podcasts on iTunes. There are podcasts on my iPod that I use for running. And never the three shall meet. Seriously, ever since Apple divorced podcasts off into their own separate app, podcast management has been a disaster. For a while, I couldn’t get them to sync at all, so I subscribed to a bunch of them on the phone itself. Now I sometimes get double-copies from there and from iTunes. Plus, for some reason, the default (and so far as I can tell, only) order in which your podcasts are displayed in the gawdawful podcast app is the popular and helpful “totally fucking random”.[sup]1[/sup] I was looking for the Breaking Bad Insider podcast earlier this morning, to see if a new one had shown up yet. I’m pretty sure it’s on the list somewhere, as I listened to last week’s. But I sure as hell couldn’t find it, because the list started with “NPR: Ask Me Another Podcast”, followed by “NPR Programs: Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me Podcast”, “StarTalk Radio Show by Neil deGrasse Tyson”[sup]2[/sup], and “Welcome to Night Vale”. Oh, and my car doesn’t recognize “Podcasts” as a separate category any more, since it’s no longer on the “Music” menu, so if I want to listen to a podcast in my car, I either have to use the aux jack and a headphone cable, or I have to dig through hundreds of artists/songs/whatever until I find whatever it’s calling itself. In a word, or rather, in an onomatopoeic interjection: Grr.

So I’m thinking about jumping ship. Am I nuts, or might I have a better experience on some other smartphone? How much more difficult will it be to keep my various devices (including the aformentioned iPod and the iPad that I almost never bother to sync with iTunes anyway) more or less on the same page?

[1] Actually, this isn’t entirely random, now that I look at it. It’s in the order I’ve added them. This is still not helpful.

[2] Did any of you listen to the sex episode from last? week? I know that the format is Neil + comedian, but one would think he could’ve done a bit better than what he came up with. All the Doctor Ruth in the world (and what a delightful lady she is) could not make listening to that boring twit’s annoying voice worth it.

2

If you want to keep using iTunes, there is no official app for Android. I don’t use iTunes for anything, so I just subscribe directly to the RSS feeds using my podcast app. There are lots of those to choose from on Android, with lots of choices WRT features. I don’t know how any of them would work with your car, you might be stuck with the cable hookup.

I have to say, I love to see Tyson on shows as a guest, and am looking forward to the new Cosmos, but I am getting closer and closer to dropping the StarTalk podcast. The format just isn’t working for me.

3

I think your question is more like “Is there a good podcast app on Android?” Of course “good” is a subjective term.

Are there other podcast apps for iOS?

4

I’ve found two good podcast apps for my Android, though the way I use them doesn’t exactly fit with the way the OP wants to use podcasts.

MortPlayer Audio Books is pretty good for playing podcasts I downloaded via desktop iTunes. However, it doesn’t sync in iTunes; I usually activate the USB file sharing and copy mp3 files from my itunes library podcast folders over to my Android SD card podcast folder. That could get annoying with an awful lot of podcasts.

The other is Podkicker, which will subscribe to podcasts and download new episodes over wi-fi direct from your Android, with no need to use the desktop; basically it incorporates something like the podcast management functions of iTunes. (As does DownCast for iOs.)

5

Just to note, I also use Podkicker for podcasts. Not perfect but does what I want well enough that I paid for the pro version. There are a lot of other apps to check out that I have heard of, but I don’t know how any of them work.

6

How you tried any of the many other iPhone podcast clients? You don’t have to use Apple’s and a lot of the Android apps which you’d be using if you switched are available for your iPhone as well.

7

This Apple support discussion might help. I haven’t tried the Apple Podcasts app since they upgraded it to use iCloud sync, so I can’t vouch for how it works. Seems that playback status and position are synced between iOS and iTunes, but not subscriptions themselves. There are other podcatchers on iOS as well.

I use Downcast, which is not free, but is very clean and easy to navigate. I only listen to about a dozen podcasts, so I can’t say how well it behaves when managing a large number. It also doesn’t sync with iTunes, but I think it does sync with other iOS devices using Downcast.

8

Is there any app that has a PC applicaton that you use to select/download/sync podcasts to your android device? I generally hate iTunes, but the one thing it does pretty well is podcast management. I’d rather discover/download/manage podcasts there and sync it to my device than fiddle around with all that stuff on my device.

9

I’ve used iPhones and iPad for as long as they’ve been around. I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 because I was considering making the switch to Android.

I am old, lazy and re-learning a new operating system is just annoying.