They don’t handle failure well. I’m not sure if this has always been the case, but the fact that most have some sort of network component now have made it very obvious.

The general lack of visibility into what is actually happening is incredibly annoying. Anything that involves syncing is in dire need of “stop and start again” button.

I actually just found out that you could force a resync on the podcasts app on macos by hitting CMD + R and that has solved some of the issues I have where I just wait around for new episodes to sync (pull down for refresh is a nightmare with a trackpad on a mac laptop). But still, it's slow (can take 10-20 seconds for a podcast to begin playing), buggy (can take a full minute for the title to appear in the display after it has already started-- so you cannot skip the first 30 seconds of ads), or just broken (havent started the app in a while? guess I will crash trying to sync all those episodes you missed). Really infuriating.

ugh yes, also a "sync right now" button