How to Cancel Castro Podcast Player

I’m a picky guy, and to me this is the perfect podcast player. First of all, the mental model of an inbox is exactly what I was looking for. Simple to understand, and keeps you from being overwhelmed if you follow a lot of podcasts. Also, since you’re less likely to be overwhelmed, you end up following more podcasts, and getting exposed to great content you would not otherwise have listens to. The UI is gorgeous and is perfected down to the last detail. I happily pay The subscription for this app, and you should do the same. Now, the one complaint. If I am trying to start a series of podcasts before going on a long road trip and I have poor connectivity, the user experience is very confusing. I’ll move a bunch of stuff into the playlist queue, but because the connectivity is poor, many things will start and then stop downloading and I’ll get spammed by a flurry of could not download alerts. This behavior surprises me, because as far as I can tell, my settings are such that these podcasts should already be downloaded. Other than this complaint, the app is great!

Excellent podcast player. There is one issue that bugs me personally though and that is if network conditions are spotty, the podcast dings out and then gives a red notification in the app stating as much. I work outside and have to wear gloves while driving machinery so although the network might be spotty it comes back right away. However the episode I was listening to does not attempt to reconnect and even if I select it again it still does not play. I have to quit the app restart it and then when I select the episode I was listening to it starts from the beginning which is annoying if I am a long ways into an already long podcast. This isn’t something I can just stop working for and deal with. It’s not much more than an inconvenience any other time, but it’s forcing me to try other apps that don’t have this issue, and since I really love the work put into Castro and enjoy its many other advantages. Please fix it. I’m happy to give it top rating regardless but sure am counting on you to read this and fix it.

I love this app. The best thing about it is I can organize individual episodes in the queue by whether I want to watch them soon or later. Its great for long drives where I can fit in multiple episodes. I also love how episodes can easily be dragged into different places on the list or into the inbox, and that episodes are marked if I have already listened to them. The option to favorite episodes is also very useful. I love all the features. My only issue is that I can't look up episodes individually. Its difficult when trying to find episodes on a specific topic or look in podcasts I'm not subscribed to for new content. I have to go to apple podcasts and look them up before I can scroll to find them in Castro. That's my only problem with the app, but possible new features that would be helpful are related podcast/episode suggestions and social features.

Why do podcast apps find it frequently difficult to treat podcast audio files like audio files. Apple podcasts scratched the itch well enough but started adding oddities like ignoring my playlist to download files I’d purposefully skipped or marking episodes as new because I stopped at the end credits. Glad I decided to switch. Castro has been sleek, simple, and a pleasure to use. Turn it on, and it plays uninterrupted as long as I want, even without WiFi or data. So simple a purpose but Castro seems to be the only one willing to do that for me. My only criticism is it does it too well. Would love to see an option where I can have it play my queue sequentially instead of jumping back to the top of the stack. I’ve got an extensive list of podcasts of different types and sometimes I need to switch it up if the mood takes me but at work or in the car I can’t reorder my queue on a whim.

I’ve tried a LOT of podcast players. It’s a long story. Anyway, I have not found any that work as consistently or as easily as Castro. It’s not overly fancy, but it is easy to use! There’s one queue — just tap a button to add an item to it — and the queue is super-simple to reorder, and it’s easy to automatically replace an old episode of something like an hourly news update with a new one. With the improvement of the podcast discovery options, my only (slight) gripe is that I would like to have a way to categorize my podcasts by topic/type, either multiple playlists or just some kind of grouping, while retaining the ability to easily add something to the queue. But I’m not willing to give up anything about the way Castro currently works to get it. I’ve been a very happy premium subscriber for a long time, and it’s one of the few subscriptions I don’t see ever giving up.