Review Insights · Google Play
Pocket Casts - Podcast App
Automattic, Inc · 113,148 ratings · ★ 4.8
4.8
★★★★★
113,148 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 44 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"podcast"
9 negative reviews mention this · 20% of all complaints
★★★★★ "I finished listening to one podcast and switched to another from another feed. The new podcast started playing, but the screen still showed the title , graphic, and duration for the previous podcast. Turning the car off and on again fixes t…" - Jeroen van Rijn
2
"downloaded"
8 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Now it's started deleting my queue randomly. Or telling me files I downloaded can't be played. Or just deleting what I'm listening to when I pause. Or reordering the queue. Just about sick of this." - Gerry McDowell
3
"episodes"
8 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Disappointed that I can no longer see which episodes I have listened to or how long they are." - Alicia C
4
"download"
8 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Now it's started deleting my queue randomly. Or telling me files I downloaded can't be played. Or just deleting what I'm listening to when I pause. Or reordering the queue. Just about sick of this." - Gerry McDowell
5
"podcasts"
7 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "App used to be good. It now will randomly delete your download and remove it from your now playing. takes 1-4 re-downloads to get it to work. any other app will handle podcasts better" - Cody Kretzer
6
"play"
7 negative reviews mention this · 16% of all complaints
★★★★★ "I finished listening to one podcast and switched to another from another feed. The new podcast started playing, but the screen still showed the title , graphic, and duration for the previous podcast. Turning the car off and on again fixes t…" - Jeroen van Rijn
7
"listen"
6 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "I finished listening to one podcast and switched to another from another feed. The new podcast started playing, but the screen still showed the title , graphic, and duration for the previous podcast. Turning the car off and on again fixes t…" - Jeroen van Rijn
8
"been"
6 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "reordering the up next section, you'll drag an episode to a different spot and it just snaps back to it's precious spot. this has been a thing for at least a year and no fix. super frustrating and wastes time" - A B
9
"playing"
5 negative reviews mention this · 11% of all complaints
★★★★★ "I finished listening to one podcast and switched to another from another feed. The new podcast started playing, but the screen still showed the title , graphic, and duration for the previous podcast. Turning the car off and on again fixes t…" - Jeroen van Rijn
10
"episode"
5 negative reviews mention this · 11% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Disappointed that I can no longer see which episodes I have listened to or how long they are." - Alicia C
11
"years"
5 negative reviews mention this · 11% of all complaints
★★★★★ "2026 updates have taken all the polish off of this app 😞 Auto-downloaded episodes are not showing up, downloaded episodes are taking 5 seconds to load when playing from one episode to the next (or even sometimes when hitting "play" in the …" - David Malouf
📋 All 44 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
I finished listening to one podcast and switched to another from another feed. The new podcast started playing, but the screen still showed the title , graphic, and duration for the previous podcast. Turning the car off and on again fixes the issue. Volvo EX40.
You broke Android Auto, I can't see podcast dates or how much I've listened too. This is now utterly useless to me. Please fix, thanks!
Now it's started deleting my queue randomly. Or telling me files I downloaded can't be played. Or just deleting what I'm listening to when I pause. Or reordering the queue. Just about sick of this.
works terribly now.
App used to be good. It now will randomly delete your download and remove it from your now playing. takes 1-4 re-downloads to get it to work. any other app will handle podcasts better
excellent for jumping begining and end of a episode , with tons of audio content.however it confrontes with the ad blocking app litiaotiao,
recently, after i downloaded episodes and added them to my playlist, they were unplayable and removed from my playlist before i tried to play them but the unplayable episodes remain
buggy and obviously not even used by the devs yet another reason to ditch Android
not worth being behind a paywall
App suddenly downloaded almost 3 GB using cellular data without warning even though I have it set to only download on Wi-Fi and I only listen to downloaded episodes.
After years of use have had to finally delete this app because of the excessive amount of ads inserted. 20 mins of ads on a 40 min episode makes the time investment not worth it, easier to just find the same show on another service.
Mostly works well but the Up Next feature was clearly designed by a gerbil, because no human being could be possibly be stupid enough to design such a worthless feature and not include a way to turn it off. What's the point of having playlists if the app is just going to decide what it wants me to listen to next regardless of what's on the playlist? Ruins the entire app.
glitched out so I couldn't jump ahead, etc. I moved on to antenna pod and never looked back
++/UODATE TO REPLY++0What did I write, fools?++I paid one month to try PC without ads, and they remained anyway. These were not ads included by the pocasters. So no more subscription for me, and I'm going back to Spotify Premium.
No free version for Wear OS. Only the Plus version is supported.
Downhill In A Hand Basket. Suddenly packed with useless generative AI slop nonsense nobody asked for!!! Absolutely silly. All this app needs to do is be able to play pause skip etc podcasts. Don't recommend, there are better options that don't try to shovel slop into a previously fine app.
Since the latest up the app crashes instantly after opening.
I've been using this app for over a decade. Recently Auto Downloading stopped working on a few podcasts. Please fix.
I can't open the app
Been using for years. has become very buggy in recent months like deleting play lists randomly and stopping episodes randomly for no reason
So unintuitive I found it unusable. the most baffling app I've ever come across.
Does not know most Dutch podcasts. Even with SoundCloud link or RSS. Very amateuristic. (edit) wow. It has gotten worse. I have a list of podcasts to automatically download over wifi. I have been on ONLY wifi for 5 weeks, and this mother of an app downloaded none of my podcasts. Now I am on data, and I can not listen to anything. Can I give -10 stars?
unusable, crashes on launch
What is up with this playlist thing? Just to back to the up next thing. Nobody needs a podcast playlist, it's not 3 minute songs.
The last week I haven't been able to download anything. I have lots of space on my phone but app says "low storage space".
forward and back buttons not working with latest update
I'm paying monthly and there's still ads? Nope, I'll listen to ads for free
Disappointed that I can no longer see which episodes I have listened to or how long they are.
2026 updates have taken all the polish off of this app 😞 Auto-downloaded episodes are not showing up, downloaded episodes are taking 5 seconds to load when playing from one episode to the next (or even sometimes when hitting "play" in the currently playing-but-paused episode). There's still a lot of great features but it's always a bummer to use the app when it's degraded like this. For the first time in many years, I'm considering alternatives to this app.
reordering the up next section, you'll drag an episode to a different spot and it just snaps back to it's precious spot. this has been a thing for at least a year and no fix. super frustrating and wastes time
formerly a five star review. I get tired of having to skip the sign in screen every time I open the app. no, I'm not going to make a freaking account to listen to podcasts on an app I bought. if this doesn't go away soon I'm giving this one star and using a different app. there's no shortage out there.
buggy and frequently hides episodes regardless of settings. downloaded a podcast to show friends on a car ride, and proceeded to fight the app to play the saved episodes, because Id listened to them before and it kept re-marking them as listened. suboptimal for anyone who doesnt want the most bare bones podcast playing features with no intent to revisit anything theyve listened to
Seems ok, price is reasonable. But there is no way to select or filter by language. If all you need is English, it may be fine for you. Useless for me.
I would give it a much higher score except for my one complaint. When I get about 5 minutes into a podcast it decides to backup about 2 minutes. Super annoying.
Have been using Pock Casts for years and enjoyed, but for past few weeks having playback issues of downloaded podcasts. They'll download fine but once added to next up queue they won't play at all. I have to archive, download again, and add to up next queue again. Second time around they'll now play. Figured it's a bug and would be updated, but since it's been weeks posting negative review in hopes it gets devs aware. Look forward to improving rating once fixed.
I always download the content before playing the downloaded content but I've noticed lately that the content has dropouts as if the downloaded content is bad. I don't see a way to tell why the sound goes away while it still plays and the comes back.
used to love this but its gone downhill. frequently seems to fail to download episodes, even when connected to my home WiFi. It's become harder to download when out and about too.
Was a 5 stars until they started to plays ads at volume 10. No longer can I fall asleep to my favorite podcast or listen to it at work. This app is now absolutely useless to me. Commercials should be lower or the same volume as the main show.
vastly inferior to the iPhone version of the same app. Why?
was excellent but has started randomly resetting itself in the middle of podcasts, requiring attention to continue the podcast
Works, but frustrating! I only used it for sleeping and too often it would just stop, even with the sleep timer it would stop, which wakes us up. Plus, way too complicated for basic operations!
This app likes to skip parts of episodes, and malfunctions in other ways quite often as well. I like the options for the app icon and theme of the app, but its impossible to contact the app makers for problems pertaining to the app over all.
App has recently stopped properly syncing listening progress between devices. Quite annoying to see a podcast with the progress bar part way through the episode, only for it to start at the beginning when one hits play 😩. Still can't stream to general DLNA devices (such as my Raspberry Pi running Volumio) which is annoying. Considering they massively hiked prices a couple of years ago, this feels like a big drop in quality.
This was the best Podcast player but... inexplicably the setting to only download on Wi-Fi no longer works. very annoying and a waste of my cellular data
Sentiment summary
96%
Positive (4-5★)
2%
Neutral (3★)
3%
Negative (1-2★)