I’m always surprised when people complain about it. It does everything it should for me, syncs with my other devices and automatically downloads the new episode over night and tells me about it in the morning. What are you missing?

I live in Germany. I can only see German-language podcasts in the app. If I want to see podcasts in English, I need to switch my whole iTunes account to a different country. Of course, that creates problems elsewhere.

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

You mean for the suggestions / Top 10 lists? Yes these are the ones from your current country just like in the iTunes store.

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.

Apple's podcast app has always been horrible at syncing between devices. Overcast was like a breath of fresh air.

Mind elaborating? I just search for a podcast and click play. Never seemed to need much more functionality than that. What am I missing?

It often fails to download podcasts. Overcast I can just tap 'download' and trust that it will do its work. Not Apple Podcasts.

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.

Let's just take the "play bar" (for lack of a better term) that hovers over the 4 menu items at the bottom. It's always there. That's sooo frustrating. It grates on my desire for tidiness. Let me clear that. Long pressing shows no option to clear it. It ... it's just not intuitive at all.

Presumably if you're listening to a podcast you're not digging around the Podcast app? This is how Music works, and I think Podcasts copied this.

After it plays, it stays there. That bar doesn't go away.

That makes zero sense.