I agree that most podcast players just lack features. They're built for "dummies": you can subscribe and click play, that's mostly it.

I'm a power-user. Podcast Addict on Android is the best player I have used, it has a ton of features and extreme customizability. Still, I am now using PocketCasts which is inferior by a wide margin, but it has sync capability, which ends up making my life a lot easier since I don't listen to podcasts on just a single device.

I think ultimately there is still space for another podcast player that is not built for dummies and offers a wide range of features on multiple platforms. Nothing like that exists, as far as I know.

This has also affected the monetization model. Most ads use promo codes for services, but those promos expire and change, rendering that content valueless. Given these limitations, it's a miracle any producers are funding serialized content that actually has a conclusion.

S-Town released all its episodes almost 2 years ago, and Pocket Casts still has it at #23.

It's really easy for open standards to be killed by big companies, and it's impossible to create a new, open standard and get adoption when big companies already own the space.

I will not listen to podcasts on Spotify, because Spotify cannot be allowed to own podcasts like Youtube owns video.

Discoverability is certainly a concern, but only because there is _so much_ good content out there. I find out about good podcasts via word of mouth much more than any directory or online source.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder. I've scoured top podcast lists and recommendations far and wide, and have found maybe 5 or 6 podcasts worth listening to for me in my whole life. I'm sure there must be others that I'd like, but they're buried in a mountain of uninteresting content.

Edit: formatting fix.

>a program (as of music or talk) made available in digital format for automatic download over the Internet

I can see arguing that this doesn't even rule out walled-garden streams with an auto-play feature, since streaming and downloading are functionally the same (the only difference being what type of memory the data is stored in, and swap memory destroying that distinction entirely).

All the categorization stuff is totally outside of the podcasts themselves. Sure the default podcast apps suck, but lots of people have tried to do better and haven't caught on in a significant way. There are any number of alternative ways to get podcasts that I hear about all the time on the podcasts I listen to, have you tried those?

But ultimately, I don't think we want a rework of the infrastructure. It's not going to end well for podcasters or podcast listeners. User tracking, ad injection, and platform lock-in will be the priorities of the people who build the next successful podcast protocol.

It also never removes played episodes no matter what my settings.

Seriously these should be simple things.

I've never had a problem with it not deleting episodes, so I can't help you there.

I'd love to be able to use Pocket Casts or Overcast.

For Mac I suffer itunes. For Windows, I ended up installing Blue Stacks and using Google's Podcast app. Nothing native or web-based worked well for me. Unreliable or being delivered through Windows Store which constantly crashes for me were my main issues.

For a while I used live bookmarks with Firefox, that was great but shortly after Firefox removed that feature :)

I mean, come on. Most of the interesting content is in English. This is a simple feature.

You can still find every podcast if you search by name or browse by category though. You make it sound like you can only listen to German podcasts via the stock podcasts app which is definitely not the case.

I got the "this episode is not currently available" message all the time whereas I never get anything similar from Overcast.

It often fails to transition from one podcast to the next in the playlist (ie, stops playing). Sometimes even when all involved episodes have been downloaded.

It fails to automatically delete old episodes.

It fails in multiple ways when it loses connectivity. E.g., it refuses to continue playing a very well-buffered episode if there's no connectivity. Mind you, I suspect that some of the connectivity issues may be a result of them never having tested it with 'slow' connections (2Mbps in my case). This obviously wouldn't absolve them in the least, however.

This is just off the top of my head. It's one of the worst pieces of software I have ever used. From a company with billions in cash.

That makes zero sense.