I’m really posting it here to say thank you, working on and thinking about AntennaPod a few years back really helped shape what i want from a good podcast app. I got the sense AP kind of fell pray to feature creep and maybe its legacy, also contributing was extremly tedious, i guess because of work culture differences. It all lead here and i’m really proud of what i accomplished (with admittedly big help from Claude) and i wanted to share with you and give some credit back where its due.
Hope you have good one,
Ueli
PS: feel free to give any feedback on github. bug reports and ux enhancements very welcome too!
Happy for you that you have ended up with an app that works exactly the way you want it to. I suspect however that for many/most/all other potential users it will not fit the bill in one way or another and which explains the demand for new features or features to be implemented in a different way that all apps are subjected to.
Insteresting you say that, did you try my app, what specifically didn’t you like?
I believe most people just want a good default UI/UX and not tinker with settings much and thats what i’m trying to provide
My reply was based on using many, many apps including trying lots of podcatcher apps over the years and from seeing many, many online discussions which cover this.
As I have no major issue with my current choice of podcatcher I am not really interested in getting familiar with something different but I suspect that I would have to tinker with the settings in your appto get it to work the way I would prefer which would probably differ from your own choice of defaults. It is usually easier to adapt one’s own way of working than to get changes made to someone else’s app so once you have found a happy medium then why change?
My experience with apps though is that there are always things I like and things I don’t like. But there are better apps than others, designing an UI/UX is an art. My app doesn’t have settings and I think generally apps shouldn’t have many settings. They should be intuitive to use and also allow for power use that’s discoverable by using the app.
You need to learn every application, if the UI/UX is good it just takes less time to learn and to use. And thinking about this is maybe the most important work in software development.
As a user I don’t want to be required to configure an app to get it into a working state (AntennaPod kinda feels like that, though there are worse ones). Usually too many settings come in with feature creep, where the app includes too many niche functions that maybe useful in edge cases but degrade the UX overall.
A podcast app is just a podcast app, it should be simple. I want to listen to podcasts, not run an archive or program the settings for hours. I still want open source and the best UI/UX thats not compromised by profit incentives or feature creep.
Therefore I think AntPod is uniquely positioned to become a great and popular app and I’m glad for any feedback that help improve the intuitive usability and effective enjoyment of podcasts.
PS: a great example is Voice, an open source audiobook app, there are virtually no settings and it just works effortlessly. I also really like MaterialFiles and Nextcloud (eg notes app), to name a few more examples.
I agree that one sign of a good UI is that it is easy for the new user to do the basic things simply and intuitively delegating any more esoteric behaviours to menus and settings. And saying that I accept that AP does not always get that right to my way of thinking (the large use of long-press drop down menus is what confounds many new users for example).
I must confess that I am not a heavy AP user as I have it as my secondary / backup podcatcher app to use when there are issues with the feeds on my main app. So I can only talk about things in general after a career in IT (mainframes, long since retired) and a gadget user.
I’m sorry that the collaboration in AntennaPod didn’t work out but happy to see that you’ve decided to stay active in the open source podcast domain. And thanks mentioning it back here.
I must say I’m not too happy with the name due to its similarity with AntennaPod. But I guess we can’t ask you to change that.
