From Overcast to Castro: A Podcast App Journey
I listen to a lot of podcasts.
Over the years, I’ve used just about every podcast app worth trying, but for a long time, Overcast was my go-to. One of the big features that kept me there was the “priority” system, which pushed your favorite shows to the top of the queue automatically. It helped manage the chaos.
That feature stopped working reliably around the time of Overcast’s big rewrite in 2024. I kept using it for a while, hoping things would improve, but they never really did. At one point I removed all of the prioritization settings to simplify things, but that only made the experience worse.
So I started looking around.
I gave Pocket Casts a try, and to its credit, it was mostly great. Filters were powerful, syncing worked well across devices, and the UI was clean and dependable. But over time, I missed the triage-style listening flow I was used to. Neither Overcast nor Pocket Casts really delivered that anymore. I tried to rig up my own system which was mostly really solid, but it just wasn’t the right fit for me.
That’s when I decided to give Castro another look.
Castro was acquired by new developers in 2024, and the app has seen a real resurgence since then. Long-standing bugs and edge case issues have been addressed, and the core experience that made Castro compelling in the first place has stayed intact.
What I’ve always appreciated about Castro is its Inbox and Queue system. You can subscribe to your favorite shows, but new episodes don’t go straight into your Up Next list unless you want them to. Instead, they show up in an inbox for review. This makes it easy to be intentional about what I listen to. You can also push important episodes to the top of your queue, which gives me back the control I lost when Overcast’s system broke.
And while it’s not the most important thing for a podcast app, Castro is the best looking option in my opinion. The typography, layout, and color choices are all more thoughtful than the competition. You don’t spend a lot of time inside the app once you hit play, but good design still matters, and Castro gets it right. The voice boost and trim silence features aren’t quite as good as Overcast in my experience, but it’s all still there.
For now, Castro is the podcast app that best fits how I want to listen. Unless something major changes, I’m planning to stick with it. The yearly subscription is $25 instead of $15, but it’s being actively developed at a clip much greater than what I’ve seen in Overcast-land.
