Apple Podcasts 12+

I don’t know where to begin but I have been listening and actually dancing with Sah and how I found this beautiful soul was not coincidence as I was going through my own grieving of loosing my mom. I’m just beyond grateful for these podcasts! Inspired and seen and heard that i can only say thank you for having the courage to come forward and BE that bridge for many of us. Today as I listened to this episode with Ash Canty and all her experiences as well as Sah’s experiences I was in tears of love, compassion, gratitude and kindness. I felt as if I was part of some of those experiences as well and wow it brought so much attention from the medial world as well and how little they know about the spiritual, and the body to the care of patients and the sickness is real and how ironic to say that in the health care system. I love you Sah thank you for making my morning even more aware of advocacy for mental health care and to know that even when we saw walking in this processes alone there’s humans like you willing to be a face to bring more awareness. Because without love and consciousness there’s no way to liberate and evolve as a humanity.
♾️✨🧘🏽‍♀️🤩🌈🙏🏽

I was a stitcher user until they shut down, so I’m new to Apple Podcasts. Since I started this I’ve found it technically better in format and playback and better for finding content. Now I’ve found so many cool shows that i have more content than I could ever listen to!
All good, but there are issues that REALLY annoy me, to the point where I took off 2 stars.
First off, the app should open with new episodes, which is what I mainly want to see.
On a slow day i can browse around and find something else.
Most of all though, are the technical shortcomings. I should say that there might be solutions to these somewhere in settings but the fact that I can’t find them are just as big of a problem. I hate auto play! I don’t want to hear the next thing on some list, i want to decide the next thing to listen to. At the very least I should be able to make my own auto play list but I mostly just want to turn auto play off. I also want to turn off auto download! I’d also much rather sift through new episodes and download what I want then have to “remove download” what I don’t want to listen to, while my phone is getting a data blast to the storage! There is other things I would like to be able to tinker with the settings of, too, but basically it comes down to much more customization control in settings. That would earn this app a full 5 stars!

I’ve used this legacy Apple Podcast app for at least 3 or 4yrs now. Many of the apps that come preloaded on Apple devices are basic without a lot of customizable features but still are intuitive and function well. This app however seems to have lost usability and features seem to have diminished rather than gotten better over time.
I do like the vast number of pods available in the platform and many seem to have fewer commercials than when I use them on other platforms. I also like the basic usability in that you can initially figure out how to use it without referring to instructions- or used to. Also keeping up with my library across devices is great.
BUT sometime over the past 6 months or so it seems like some of the default features have changed. The main problem I have is when an episode has finished it now seems to auto play the next PREVIOUS episode, even if it has already been played and clearly shows as ‘played’. I swear it used to go to the next UNPLAYED episode or just stop if you were up to date. Having an old episode auto play is super frustrating when you’re driving or perhaps cooking with messy hands so that you can’t just stop what you’re doing and manually select a new episode.