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If this app worked as intended, it would be excellent, however it appears to have some frustrating quirks and stability issues. First and foremost are the crashes. It crashes when you pause about half the time, it crashes when you select a podcast, sometimes it just seems to crash for really no reason at all. On a typical weekday I use this app for about 2-3 hours and will see 1-2 crashes each day. The second issue is that the app will always, always try to play the previous unfinished podcast, even if you have a playlist or have a different cast selected as “play next”. For instance, the last minute of most casts is just an outro, an ad, or credits so I will skip to the next cast. If I allow a cast to play to the very end, Overcast will begin playing the last unfinished minutes of all previous casts even if I have a new cast queued. I’ve used this app for about a year and will say it is better than the native Apple app, but only just barely, owing only to Overcast’s better layout. However its stability issues and infuriating quirks hobble it badly. Update July 2021: Even worse these days! Crashes about every 3-5 minutes. When I relaunch the app, it starts me at the beginning of the podcast, losing my place.

I’m on an iPhone 6, using iOS 11.4.1. This app used to be at least a 4 star app, but ever since iOS 11, the app is more frustration than fun. First, an ongoing issue even before iOS 11, is the amount of space it takes up. I’m finding I’m having to delete and re-download the app every month, because I’m finding it taking up nearly ten gigs of space, despite the fact that I have it set to stream podcasts, not download them. There seems to be no intuitive way to get it to stop downloading. Second, now with iOS 11, I’m having to open the app several times to get it to stay open. It’ll usually crash a couple of times first. Third, and the issue that frustrated me enough to write this review and look for a new player: I listen to podcasts for hours at a time at work, using headphones. Sometimes I’ll need to pause an episode to do some work or talk to someone, and I’ll pause it using the button on my headphones. When I press the button again to start it... nothing. I’ll try again a few times, nothing. I’ll have to stop what I’m doing, take my phone out of my pocket, unlock it, and restart overcast. Sometimes it’ll open and be frozen for fifteen seconds before it’ll start responding, sometimes it’ll just crash and I have to try again. This happens SO OFTEN that this app has basically become useless to me.

I absolutely love the design and aesthetics of this app and the sound quality is also top notch. The Smart Speed and Audio Boost features are also quite nifty features that I’ve come to adore. The Smart Speed has been especially useful for speeding past “dead zones” in the audio where nothing is happening and its saved me lots of time to listen to other podcasts and what’s better, the audio does not get distorted when speeding it up, unlike other podcast apps where the audio gets pitched higher or becomes robotized when ou speed it up. Unfortunately though, as of late, the app constantly crashes whenever I use it, whether it be on my iPad Pro or my iPhone SE. The Overcast symbol can be seen in the background but after 10 or so seconds, it crashes back to the home screen and it does this again and again, ad infinitum. I’ve been installing all of the updates and trying everything, from clearing the cache of the device to uninstalling and reinstalling the app to little avail. When this app works, it’s absolutely amazing. But when it doesn’t then it is unfortunately quite tragic. I hope that Marco can find a way to remedy this so that I can return to my podcasts.