Withers Without You

I lost a friend in software today as I delete Overcast from my iPhone. A ten year relationship ended because life’s too short to use annoying apps.

For software that I’ll often use a lot, on most days, the developer changed so many fundamental ways the app worked that it went from an app I loved dearly for a decade to the most annoying thing on my phone.

Enacting sleep mode, something I’d do as I drearily fall asleep in a hotel room away from my family had been buried away.

Streaming, something I didn’t realise I used that much, because really annoying. Streaming barely worked before the upgrade - if I was sent an Overcast episode listen link from a friend it would almost never play on first try - but then to lose the feature was really annoying.

It became an exercise in re-learning how to walk, but I’d never had an accident, I was just subjected to an updated and poorer experience.

Plus iOS 18’s beta cycle hasn’t been kind to Overcast either, which is totally my cross to carry, but it’s still impacted the upgraded use experience.

So I had to decide whether the Overcast audio engine was worth staying for, and decided I could live without. (Tim Apple: please feel free to buy Overcast and integrate the audio engine into Apple Podcasts.)

So little did I know that Apple Podcasts has actually gotten a lot better recently.

The podcast transcription is a feature I really like, and anyone I share podcast links with and from uses Apple Podcasts so shareability of podcasts is so much easier as is clicking links from podcast websites.

Every podcast website has an Apple Podcasts link, none have an Overcast link.

Before the Overcast update it was a fringe decision to be on a third party podcast app. After the update it was a liability.

Life’s too short to be confusedly thumbing through podcast apps trying to figure it all out again.

Why blog about it? Because I can’t review about it.