Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast 1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully beyond. Like podcasts better than blog posts? Listen to ATP #596 for more! What’s new Much faster, more responsive, more reliable, and more accessible. Modern design, optimized for easily-reached controls on today’s phone sizes. Improvements throughout, such as undoing large seeks, new playlist-priority options, easier navigation, and more. What’s not Most features. Overcast is still Overcast! The audio engine. It’s the best part of Overcast, and still leads the industry in sound quality, silence skipping, and volume normalization. (More soon!) The business. I’m still a one-person operation, with no funding or external ownership, serving only my customers. My principles. I always want to make the best podcast app, and I’ll never disrespect your time, attention, or privacy. What’s gone Streaming. Most big podcasts now use dynamic ad insertion, which causes bugs and problems for streaming playback.1 Downloading episodes completely before they begin playback is much more reliable. Tapping a non-downloading episode will now open the playback screen, download it, then start playback. It works similarly to the way streaming did before, but playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered. On today’s fast networks, this usually only takes a few extra seconds. And in the near future, I’ll be adding smarter options and more control over selective downloading of episodes to further improve the experience for people who don’t automatically download every episode. What’s next The last few missing features from the old app, such as Shortcuts support, storage management, and OPML. These are absent now, but will return soon. More options for downloading and deleting episodes. Upgrading the Apple Watch app to the new, faster sync engine. (The Watch app is currently unchanged from the previous one.) And, of course, more features, including some of your most-requested features over the last decade. Getting this rewrite out the door was a monumental task. Thank you for your patience as I work through this list! Why? Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person. That’s why there haven’t been many new features or changes in years. You saw it, and I saw it. I wasn’t able to serve my customers as well as I wanted. For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency. Now, development is rapidly accelerating. I’m more responsive, iterating more quickly, and ultimately making the app much better. Thank you all so much for the first decade of Overcast. Here’s to the next one. Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) splices ads into each download, and no two downloads are guaranteed to have the same number or duration of ads. So, for example, if the first half of an episode downloads, then the download fails, and it downloads the second half with another request, the combined audio may jump forward or back at the halfway mark, losing or repeating content. ↩︎

Overcast’s latest update (2022.2) brings the largest redesign in its nearly-eight-year history, plus many of the most frequently requested features and lots of under-the-hood improvements. I’m pretty proud of this one. For this first and largest phase of the redesign, I focused on the home screen, playlist screen, typography, and spacing. (I plan to revamp the now-playing and individual-podcast screens in a later update.) The home screen is radically different: Home screen, before (left) and after (right). Playlists now have strong visual identities for nicer and easier navigation. Each playlist has a customizable color, and a custom icon can be selected from over 3,000 SF Symbols to match modern iOS design and the other icons within Overcast. And playlists can be manually reordered with drag-and-drop. Recently played and newly published episodes can now be displayed on the home screen for quick access, much like the widget and CarPlay experience. Podcasts can now be pinned to the top of the home-screen list. Pinned podcasts can also be manually reordered with drag-and-drop. I’ve also rethought the old stacked “Podcasts” and “Played Podcasts” sections to better match people’s needs and expectations. Now, the toggle atop the podcast list switches between three modes: podcasts with current episodes, all followed podcasts, and inactive podcasts (those that you don’t follow and therefore won’t get any more episodes from, or haven’t posted a new episode in a long time). The playlist screen’s structure remains mostly the same, while refining the design for the modern era: Playlist screen, before (left) and after (right). Here, it’s more apparent that I’ve replaced the system San Francisco font with an alternate variant, San Francisco Rounded, to increase legibility and better match the personality of the app. I’ve also added highly demanded features: By far, Overcast’s most-requested feature is a Mark as Played feature. That’s now available as a checkmark button on episode rows, as well as a left-side swipe action. The second-most-requested feature is a way to view all starred episodes. Special playlists for Starred, Downloaded, and In Progress can now be created. The light and dark themes now each have a customizable tint color from the modern iOS UI-color palette, including these favorites from beta testers: And throughout the app, I’ve made tons of tweaks and bug fixes, including: Notifications and background downloads are now much more reliable. Episode downloads can now be individually deleted or re-downloaded. Links can now be opened in Safari. (under Nitpicky Details) Performance is now significantly better with very large playlists and collections. Fixed bugs with episode-duration detection, CarPlay lists, Mac-app sharing, and much more. So much is better in this update that I can’t even remember it all. Thank you so much to everyone who helped me beta-test this massive update. As always, Overcast is free in the App Store. Go get it!

Losing Steve affected me more than it probably should have, given that I never met him or had any correspondence with him. But losing him was devastating — not just to my world, but the world. He was a sort of virtual father figure: I was always hoping that maybe Steve would notice something I did. We all wanted his attention and approval, and that drove us to do better work — even those of us who never worked at Apple. Nobody replaced him in this role. Nobody can. But as an outsider who had no personal relationship with him to mourn, it has been most depressing to consider how much of his work the world missed out on. He wasn’t taken from us after a long, complete life — he was taken in his prime. He had so much more to offer the world.

Apple’s leaders continue to deny developers of two obvious truths: That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple. That any portion of our customers came to our apps from our own marketing or reputation, rather than the App Store. For Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting — not only to our efforts, but to the intelligence of all Apple developers and customers. This isn’t about the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of other payment systems, or the rules against telling our customers about our websites, or Apple’s many other restrictions. (Not today, at least.) It’s about what Apple’s leadership thinks of us and our work. *     *     * It isn’t the App Store’s responsibility to the rest of Apple to “pay its way” by leveraging hefty fees on certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones. Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today. If Apple wishes to continue advancing bizarre corporate-accounting arguments, the massive profits from the hardware business are what therefore truly “pay the way” of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and other app-development resources, just as the hardware profits must fund the development of Apple’s own hardware, software, and services that make the iPhone appeal to customers. The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy. The “way” is already paid by the hardware — but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip. And that’s just business. Apple’s a lot of things, and “generous” isn’t one. But to bully and gaslight developers into thinking that we need to be kissing Apple’s feet for permitting us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but deeply insulting. *     *     * Apple further extends the value argument, and defends their justification for forced commissions, by claiming responsibility for and ownership of the customer relationship between all iOS users and each app they choose to use. This argument only makes sense — and even then, only somewhat — when apps are installed by a customer browsing the App Store, finding an app they hadn’t previously heard of, and choosing to install it based on App Store influence alone. But in the common case — and for most app installations, the much more common case — of searching for a specific app by name or following a link or ad based on its developer’s own marketing or reputation, Apple has served no meaningful role in the customer acquisition and “deserves” nothing more from the transaction than what a CDN and commodity credit-card processor would charge. The idea that the App Store is responsible for most customers of any reasonably well-known app is a fantasy. It isn’t the App Store that has enabled all of the commerce on iOS — it’s the entire world of computing and modern society, created by a symbiotic ecosystem in which Apple played one part alongside many others. The world was already moving in this direction, and had Apple not played its part, someone else would’ve. The App Store is merely one platform’s forced distribution gateway, “facilitating” the commerce no more and no less than a web browser, an ISP or cellular carrier, a server-hosting company, or a credit-card processor. For Apple to continue to claim otherwise is beyond insulting, and borders on delusion. *     *     * At WWDC next week, these same people are going to try to tell us a different story. They’re going to tell us how amazing we are, how important our work is, and how much they value us. And for thousands of Apple employees who’ve made the great products and platforms that we love, including the hundreds of engineers presenting the sessions and working the labs, it’ll be genuine and true. But the leaders have already shown us who they really are, what they really think of us, and how much they value our work. Please forgive some sloppiness in my metaphors or phrasing — my writing skills are pretty rusty — and I’ll return the favor to anyone who responds.