My partner indicated what they like about other podcast apps is to explore podcasts that they can listen to. Of course AP has the ‘Discover’ screen, but it is a list of podcasts: not most attractive presentation and one-dimensional (single list of suggestions by Apple Podcasts).
It could work well together with a new ‘Home’ screen, which would be more about what the user is already subscribed to.
A completely revamped Discover screen could cover:
- What’s trending (which podcasts are popular ths last 14 days?) There’s a PI trending endpoint which isn’t documented as of yet
- in different repos, e.g. Podcast Index, Feeddirectory if the user is synching with that
- in different geographical areas, e.g. country-based
- What’s new (which podcasts were added to the Podcast Index the past week)
- Relevant networks, i.e. relevant publishers (not sure this would be possible as PI doesn’t contain such kind of metadata nor relevant images - should bring this up with them)
- from one’s geographical area, e.g. my country’s public broadcaster
- worldwide
- What others are listening
If logged in to some sync service (e.g. feeddirectory.org), or maybe PI can provide this as well, show which podcasts are popular among users that ~listen to~ are subscribed to/update feeds from a particular podcast. I.e. I am subscribed to podcast A, the (other) most subscribed podcast by those that are subscribed to A is podcast B. Then display a recommendation for each of the 10 podcasts a user listens most to (using local stats to determine which to poll against the server). - Per category:
Popular podcasts (worldwide, in own geographical area) per category. Sorting of categories can be tricky. Maybe just display random set of categories on discover screen, full alphabetical list in Categories detail view.
Any other ideas for what a revamped Discover screen could show?