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.
♾️✨🧘🏽‍♀️🤩🌈🙏🏽

While I generally find the app to be clear and easy to use, there are some critical bugs with downloads. For serial shows which have to be played in order, while the podcast creator can designate that as the intended play order, the Podcasts app doesn’t recognize it for downloads. There is no option to download the “next” set of episodes, but there is a bug with the strings. When you switch to, for example, “download 3 most recent” and then go back, the string on the outer menu is “download next 3 episodes”. You can go in and out of the menu and it will change back and forth between “next” and “most recent”. In any case, whichever you choose, it just downloads the most recent. I’m on episode 3 of a story podcast that is marked as needing to be listened to in order, and download “next/most recent 3” downloads episodes 11-13. There is simply no way to get it to download 3-5, or even just 3. This is frustrating enough that I’m deducting 2 stars. There is another flaw that has caused me to remove another star. You cannot mark a podcast series as “played up to this point”. If I’ve listened to a series on another app and am hundreds of episodes in, I can’t switch over to this app and mark those first 200 as already played. I have to do every episode manually, which is infuriating if I, again, want to listen to episodes in order.

I used to use this app every single day to listen to hours of my backlog of my favorite podcasts, then Apple suddenly switched directions and completely removed the ability for users to load and store old episodes of podcasts and manage them as they like. I spent countless hours trying to find a hidden feature to do what used to simply be the natural function of the app, when it was built into iTunes, but to no avail. My huge library of podcast content was simply lost to me. It was first scrambled by the broken Podcast app for macOS, so I could no longer access the files directly, then this app failed to support playback of the files I did have.

Archives of older episodes are often very difficult to come by, as many providers truncate the older files, or creators switch services and don’t bring their older episodes over to the new service. My years-old collection was lost. I ended up scouring the Internet to gather up as many of the raw MP3 files as I could find, and am awaiting someone to give me a way to organize and listen to them. Finally, recently, I discovered that iMazing may be a solution to load podcasts directly into this app manually, but my first attempt got some into my library, then they disappeared after I synced my phone again.

I just don’t understand they need to remove a core functionality from one of their apps that is used by so many people. :(