Why is the Podcasts App so buggy???

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Level 1

7 points

Why is the Podcasts App so buggy???

I listen to podcasts almost everyday and have been using this app ever since it was first released.

It's basically a dog's breakfast. The main problems are (1) bugs, and (2) lack of functionality.

Bugs:

1. The app will start automatically anytime an alarm goes of: someone calls you, after you hang up the last podcast you were listening to starts playing. Same thing with alarms, and even just testing ring tones. ***?

2. It frequently won't download podcasts. It is very temperamental: it will allow some podcasts to download, others not.

3. It crashes randomly in the middle of podcasts. This is what motivated me to write this review today. actually this and the fact that problem 2 took me about 2 days and 5 attempts to download the podcast that then crashed. Was this software written by children?

Lack of basic functionality:

1. No playlists or anyway to star or prioritize podcasts you want to listen to.

2. It is basically impossible to browse the titles of individual podcasts because the names are longer than the screen space.

Points 1 + 2 together are a real pain if you, like me, have a collection of one set of podcasts that is over 500 episodes you want to read over and choose from... You can't read the titles and if you take the time to read and select your favorites you can't save them.

Seriously, this app should be up there with Apple disasters like Apple Maps.

iPhone 4, iOS 6

Posted on Nov 29, 2012 4:13 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

PEmG

Level 1

15 points

Nov 29, 2012 5:42 AM in response to nickharrigan

I just replaced my prior iPhone 3G by a brand new iPhone 5 and installed this new Podcast app, as podcast content dif not appear in "music" any more.

Although I enjoy having direct sync of podcasts on the iPhone over Wifi (instead of having to plug it to my iTunes), I am not fully satisfied as well:

- for some podcasts, it seems to be working fine, event though some episodes appear much later on my iPhone as on iTunes

- for some others, it used to work fine at the start, but I do not get any of the most recent episodes anymore (they do not appear at all)

- for some others, downloading seems to always fail but streaming is OK

- for some others, I can see the episodes but cannot donwload nor stream them on my iPhone.

In the meantime, all these podcasts perfectly work on a standard iTunes (on a Mac or a PC).

I tried to unscribe an subscribe again but it didi not fix anything. Perhaps shall I try to uninstall and reinstall the application.

The erratic sync feature is definitly the most critical issue to fix by Apple.

Not supporting long labels & playlists is more a kind of "nice to have", although I agree these would be very useful.

Concern iMap, I did not have any major concern up to now with it (I do not use it so often, but it worked well at each occasion).

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