I will tell you what is happening. That is due to the Tech bubble that is taking place at the moment. Podcasts are not profitable so the market will steer new customers away from it. Notice also the 'lookup' function has become messy and lousy too.
So instead of helping customers corporations will tend to favour profit and Apple is no different.
That is especially true in Apple's case because it is heavily capitalised at the moment and innovation in functionality has not happened in recent years. I wonder if all that capital could instead be used for the development of electric car and autonomous drive instead, but guess what with the rise of index funds capital will find its way to the most valuable companies, not necessarily the most innovative.
So to conclude I have updated to IOS 11 to find out that iOS has lost its functionality due to corporate greediness, then I luckily managed to roll back to iOS 10. I found out that iOS 10 has all the functions I need at the moment and I keep deferring iOS updates on a weekly basis. I am also considering the option to moving to other service providers.
Hope this helps.
