Design

Much of Pocket Casts' appeal stems from its clean interface and adherence to Material Design. These qualities are immediately apparent in the podcast selection screen and main navigational menu. The slide-out “Hamburger” menu on the left is neatly organized, and provides buttons for the primary functions of the application, like the podcast Discovery screen and the queue of unplayed episodes, quite beautifully. The main “Podcasts” screen uses a grid of icons to represent a user’s subscriptions, which can be resized for users with a large amount of podcasts in their library. Clicking one of these icons displays that podcast’s episodes, both played and unplayed.

Played vs. Unplayed episodes

The episode list is another element of the app which is particularly well designed. Episodes which have been played are greyed out, while unplayed or unfinished episodes stand out at the top of the list. One gripe I have with displaying episodes in this manner is that unfinished episodes are mixed in with new, unplayed episodes as soon as they become available. This can make it cumbersome to locate and finish podcasts that you’ve paused and left for later, however for the most part this was a non-issue.

After selecting an episode to listen to, you’re presented with a basic audio control screen, allowing forward and backward skips, useful in finding topics of interest later in the episode, or conversations from earlier that might be worth another listen. The length of these skips can be changed to suit each user’s needs, but the default (10 seconds backward and 30 seconds forward) worked just fine for me. Swiping left from this screen reveals information about this particular episode, while swiping right will display the next episodes in your queue. This is probably my favorite part of the Pocket Casts experience, design wise. All the right information, exactly where you need it.