Reviews for Offline Podcast App: Player FM

Update: Their banner ads sometimes tap themselves! Now it pauses my podcast to play their own ads???!!! I'm now shopping for a new podcast app! Original review: Love this! I've been using it for years. Full featured for free. Thank you! I'd like to support the devs with a few bucks but I don't need the premium features and I don't like the subscription model. The app didn't recognize the downloads after transferring the data to a new sd card. Minor inconvenience.

I've always found this app very easy to use. You can tell it to download your favorite podcasts automatically and it also deletes them, after you listen. (No more deleting old episodes manually!) Customer service is extremely helpful if there's anything you can't find. And I like being able to customize the listening speed for different pods. (Normal speed for music pods. 1.3 or 1.5 for news, often. I sometimes listen to a French podcast at 0.8 so I can understand it more easily.)

I'm a heavy listener to podcasts and recently switched from iOS to Android. In an effort to find a podcast app in the Android Play Store that was comparable with the features I liked, I've been testing dozens of different podcast players. Some of the features that are most important to me in addition to having podcasts that I listen to are: clean, simple and intuitive interface, unobtrusive ads (with the ability to buy and not have to sign up for a subscription), easy navigation, ability to down

Generally good, it's the least annoying podcast app that I've found, and it has a solid amount of useful features. The one star off is because the app will randomly skip episodes (sometimes to the next on my list, sometimes to the most recent ep) when I shake or drop my phone. It's not reproducible, I can shake the hell out of my phone and nothing will happen, but it will randomly happen while driving or walking, always when the phone is moving, even if slightly. Annoying but livable.

On Pixel 4a, Android 12, you cannot search for episodes within a podcast. You can expose the search box, but the keyboard doesn't activate, so there's no way to enter any text to find. Also, some podcasts are not updating frequently enough. In some cases not showing episodes that were published many hours earlier and visible on other platforms. Is there a way to force a refresh?

Until this recent update to include in-app purchases and the mention of ads soon to be included, this was my favorite app for podcasts on Android. While I appreciate that the developers need to make money, I'm disappointed that simple, *previously free* features such as pausing between episodes(in particular a feature I used a lot as I listen to podcasts before sleeping) seem to now be gated behind paying at least $0.99/month. I would've appreciated more of a heads-up regarding the change, and may be finding myself "downgrading" my podcast listening methods to meet my preferences for free.

I downloaded this app because some of the podcasts I wanted to hear are on it and not on Spotify. The app is ok. It plays podcasts. I would rate it higher but I can't stand the way it sometimes skips around randomly, if I start playing an episode in one podcast it jumps to a completely different podcast when that episode is over. Or sometimes it jumps to the episode at the end of the list. Can't figure out how to make it just play straight through.

Player FM is a pretty great podcast player. There's an array of customization options, from how your subscribed podcasts are displayed, themes, and episode queueing, among others. Two things I wish I could change is (1) how dates are displayed, which is in weeks (annoying!) instead of the exact date; and (2) how episodes are/aren't displayed in playlists, i.e., played episodes aren't visible, which I don't like because I create many playlists with podcast episodes that I've played before.

So this was my first podcast app ever, and it served me well for years, but now that they have on screen adds, the system they are using for the adds has skyrocketed the app's battery consumption. I have it playing while plugged in to charge, and it's eating battery faster than it can charge. I've seen this app system do the same to other apps. Can't keep using if it's killing my phone.

I loved this at first because of the ultimate customizing to listening. Faster, slower (in minute amounts), skip silence, etc. But it's gone so downhill over the last couple years. Won't play down the list you chose, won't always play the episode you chose, stops randomly--in four minutes, it randomly stopped four times. And every time I open it now, even to press play after it's decided to stop, I have to exit an ad for them twice. Every time. Looking for a new app, this isn't worth it anymore.