That also means not needing to hunt through menus for what I need. Basically you can customize the menus to show you only the most common actions (sleep timer, share, mark-as-played) by default and hide the other ones you rarely use. I also find a customized Actions bar in the player is great. My skip forward is set to 30 seconds and my skip back is 15 seconds (you can customize this to your liking), so I can usually perfectly nail a skip over ads and can always go back more slowly if I missed something in the cast proper. Most podcast/audio ads are cut to adhere to a clock, so they're usually 20, 30 or 60 seconds long. So, for example I know every time I listen to the NYTime's The Daily, it'll always play at at 1.5x speed, and trim silence.Ĭustomizing the skip back/forward time length is also great. And you can customize this for every different show you listen to. Or putting a very slow podcast to always play back at 1.5 speed and trim silences. Especially for ones I listen to often, programming the app to skip the first however many seconds of intro/music and get right to the cast proper is ideal. I find the biggest perks for the app are being able to customize the settings for each podcast. You don't have to go through an inane amount of sub-screens to get to a podcast, an episode, etc. Its default way of organizing, arranging and displaying podcasts is what Apple used to have before the fucked up the design with an iOS update years ago. The biggest reason to switch, for me, is because PocketCasts just makes sense. This is someone who happily paid the $5 for the app and don't mind at all that its free now. Nothing has come close to what PocketCasts offers. I find that app so counter-intuitive and a genuinely adversarial to the user in its design that I quit using it in disgust a few years ago and tried a few different apps. If you listen to a lot of podcasts, the deep customization options for PocektCasts make it a clear alternative to the base Apple app.

Pocket cast apple watch