![]() ![]() The anger was amplified by the fact that Pocket Casts has been a well-received app for years, so V7 was an extremely rare misstep for the team. In retrospect, the entire situation could have been handled much better, by notifying users about upcoming removals and not being snarky on Twitter. ![]() Removing barely-used features is a common practice that helps reduce future bugs and improve the overall product for everyone. The pocketcasts sensor platform lets you monitor how many unplayed episodes you have of your favorite podcasts at Pocket Casts. I understand where the team is coming from on many of the changes, especially as a developer. The Chromecast button also doesn't appear sometimes, which seems to be a problem for others as well. The most annoying change for me is that the number of unread episodes for each podcast is no longer displayed on the main screen (Update: This can be enabled by tapping the menu at the top-right and setting 'Badges' to 'All unfinished'). I'm still trying to get used to the design, which feels like an iOS app half-ported to Android. I've personally used Pocket Casts for over two years (Google Play says I bought it in October 2016), and while I'm not a fan of the new update, I personally didn't use any of the removed features. In the comments, he revealed that multi-select "is on our roadmap for a future update." When asked if the previous version could be made available through official channels, he said, "We have big server changes on our roadmap and I feel like saying 'Here's version 6, sorry' is just going to be a slap in the face if that stops working in 3 months time." You might not agree with that decision, but that's the why and the how." But we made the decision to remove it, in order for the app to be the best it can be. That doesn't mean the less than 1% who used it didn't love it. The reason we didn't commit to it was simple: could we find a way to make it work, without breaking a whole bunch of other things and without making the app harder to use? We also have real world analytics and usage number, less than 1% of our user base used this feature. This was an agonising decision that we didn't commit to until very late in the beta process. What we removed was the ability to create more than one playlist. You can queue episodes up in it, re-arrange them, edit it, it syncs to everywhere you use our app. "To clear one thing up: our app has a playlist feature, it's called "Up Next". By making Pocket Casts open source, this means that anyone can access the code, fix bugs, create new features, and even fork it to build their own competing service on top of the Pocket Cast codebase. ![]()
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