by shiftyjelly

Pocket Casts 6.8 for iOS is now available from the App Store.

First up is a brand new Apple Watch app. Think of it as a tiny Pocket Casts remote that’s always strapped to your wrist. Play and pause podcasts, skip over boring bits or back to things you just missed. If you feel like something new: browse your Up Next or Episode Filters for a different episode to play. One tap, and it’s playing on your phone. A lot of you asked for this so we’re happy to finally bring it to you. As always hit us up on Twitter with feedback about what you like about it and what things if any you’d like us to change.

We’ve also made huge changes to our CarPlay integration to address connection issues and other bugs. Unfortunately this meant removing the tabs we added in the previous build because they were part of the cause. For reasons known only to a certain Fruit Company the tabbed implementation in CarPlay doesn’t play nice with third-party apps like ours. On the bright side we added the currently playing episode to the Up Next list, a feature lots of you asked for so you can quickly tap that and get to your podcasts after playing some music. Additionally your podcast subscriptions are now sorted the same as they are on your phone, making them easier to find.

We’ve also made a lot of under-the-hood improvements to the app including having it better recognise mis-labelled information in podcasts. For example if a podcast author has accidentally labelled a video episode as being audio, the app will now figure this out on its own and fix it. This goes alongside the usual bug fixes and performance improvements we make in every release.

Finally we’ve been making big improvements to our server infrastructure to support future Pocket Casts updates, so look out for more features from us later this year.

Random House Keeping Note(TM): We’re also going to make a renewed effort to keep this blog up to date. Many of you were relying on it for updates on what we’re doing and what new things have launched and we’ve been a bit lax about posting these here.