I’ve been warming up to switching to GrapheneOS for months. Last month I bought a Pixel 8 (which is the buggiest effing phone I’ve ever owned, good job Google). I’ve just been waiting to have the bandwidth.
But with Google sunsetting Google Podcasts, I’ve decided to make time next week. Podcasts are a MAJOR part of my daily functioning.
Nothing beats just downloading a podcast and listening to it in VLC or you audio player of choice - I don’t really understand why podcast apps are needed.
But that said, if you need to use one AntennaPod has all the features and you can even get it on F-Droid.
A nice interface to search for shows, automatically download new episodes, listening history, options to trim silence, sync between multiple devices.
Nobody needs them, but of course people want them.
The problem is for me that it usually downloads to some obscure folder, not to where I want to save and archive my podcasts.
Any podcast app I’ve used saves them wherever it needs to be able to read them.
I think saving and archiving podcasts is a niche use-case. I’ve jumped between apps and I just go resubscribe to the shows I want. If I need to find an old episode, I just go to that show and stream or download that episode.
I can’t think of a reason why I’d need to keep those files stored anywhere.
If you don’t really care about the podcast then that’s OK, but if I like a podcast I want a permanent offline copy to relisten to if the podcast goes offline. I guess I’m a bit of a data-hoarder and that’s niche, but simply being able to save a file you download to where you want I think should be a standard feature, there’s no need for an extra layer of abstraction.
Looks like AntennaPod can do just that