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This app is beautiful! So beautiful that I instantly purchased it from the App Store because of how good it looks. The design, however, really only runs surface-deep, and opens the way for numerous UX issues. The app itself relies heavily on gestures and iconography, which by themselves are fine, but cause way-finding issues when the entire app-experience centers around them. The icons are heavily stylized, and even the “checkboxes” in the settings screen (if you can find it because of the confusing icon) make it hard to tell if the setting is enabled or not. There is also very little descriptive copy for most of the settings, so you don’t really know exactly what enabling/disabling a setting will do. Like I said though, this app really is easy on the eyes. If the developers address some of these usability issues, I’m sure this would replace my go-to podcast app, Pocket Casts.

I love this app and think its by far my favorite UI. HOWEVER, it will randomly skip podcast episodes I have not listened too. Sometimes it will play the first split second of an episode and then skip it, and I can go find it and download it again, but sometimes I just never hear an episode and then I go look for it, its marked played but I have not heard it yet. I am now worried i'm missing episodes entirely. This is a big problem for a podcast app, once its fixed then back to 5 stars because its really a great app but this is an awful and problematic bug. Also looking forward to Apple Watch support.

The app is beautiful, albeit clunky and lacking features. While other podcast apps allow manual refresh, I have to just wait and hope Agora will load in the most recent podcasts. (Update: it turns out I needed to pull to refresh in the library section, not very intuitive in my experience) It also doesn’t allow for changing skip increments from 30s forward and back. Actions feel buried under multiple gestures and it’s easy to loose your sense of space while browsing podcasts in the library. Overall the learning curve is relatively high because Agora does not follow common design pattens in iOS. On top of this, Agora’s on-boarding process only uses text, it’s difficult to just figure out how things work. Otherwise, there is a lot of thoughtful haptic feedback, dark mode based on screen brightness, and a now playing queue which works great. All in all, this is a beautiful app, but it needs attention with regard to user experience. I’m looking forward to seeing how this app progresses.