For many of us podcasts have become an essential part of our weekly entertainment / education routines, and as such our podcast players are almost sacrosanct. As a result when there’s a major change to our apps some of us don’t handle the change all that well.
Some of that is because as animals we don’t like change, some of that is because an update to an app may remove that one feature that made that app the perfect app for US. The Australian team behind one of the most popular podcasts apps Pocket Casts have learnt that lesson over the past month.
With the recent update of Pocket Casts to 7.x a vocal minority of users took to forums, social media and of course Play Store review comments to unleash their feelings about the change.
After a bit of a rocky start with the PR around this the team at Shifty Jelly have released an update today addressing two of the major complaints about the new version. The two major updates are the return of the ability to select multiple episodes at once, and the ability to sort your play list in various ways.
Multi Select
One of the features some users were most incensed at losing was the ability to select multiple podcasts at once to apply an action to. Well it’s back and whats more the app will remember the order in which you selected them. If you’re adding things to the up next list it will add them in the order you selected them!
Sorting
The other returning feature is the ability to change how podcasts are sorted. You can now sort via release date, series, downloaded/not downloaded and played/unplayed. This combined with the new played/not played and archive functionality really adds a lot of power to podcast management. I know when I started to listen to the entire Stuff you Should Know back catalogue I would have loved these feature.
Now we know this doesn’t address every request for a feature to return, and we know that there are some features that the team have already said will not be returning. However it’s great to see the team responding to feedback and requests are relatively quickly iterating on the app.
If you could polity ask Shift Jelly to make one change to version 7 what would it be?
