When I wrote my Podcasts article yesterday, I had not yet had a chance to listen to the latest episode of Amplified (which had come out earlier in the day). Dan and Jim talked a little bit about Apple’s Podcasts app. And I do agree that this can only be good in the broader market because it will bring more attention and spotlight to Podcasting.
And again I agree, those of us already using apps like Instacast, or Downcast are in a minority of podcast power users. The average user does not care about most of the features we care about, and that’s if they are interested in podcasts at all. Which of course circles back around to the point, if they weren’t interested before, perhaps with more spotlight on podcasting they will be interested now.
However, my point was and is that I think Apple has made some things unnecessarily complicated for the average user. Specifically and mainly my points about how awkward and unintuitive subscribing and syncing is. My thoughts when I first opened the app went from, “very nice looking app, beautiful even - ooohh, cool tape deck effect,” to, “What on earth is going on here, why are basic functions so hard?”
Those of us who love Apple and Apple products love them for a reason. We like nice things, we like well designed and easy to use nice things. And this often times makes us very critical. I for one am not afraid to voice my opinion when I think they blew it, and I personally think that this Podcasts app is not a very good app. Not for me, and not for average consumers.
All the problems are fixable though, and sometimes Apple shows a willingness to listen and fix things so I’ll be perfectly willing to revisit this app and my opinion of it a version or three down the road.