Eli Budelli for Wordpress.com:

Pocket Casts will be joining Automattic, making it easier for podcast fans to discover new content and customize their listening experience.

Interesting portfolio of products Automattic has been building with these recent acquisitions, like Tumblr, Day One, and now Pocket Casts. I’ve loved Pocket Casts for a long time, it’s nice to see them secure a path to longterm growth and success.

Ashley Carman for The Verge:

In a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcaster suggests that healthy young people don’t need the COVID-19 vaccine, contrary to the advice of health professionals trying to stem a pandemic that’s killed more than 3 million people.

He's a podcast host, not a doctor. Anyone who looks to Joe Rogan for advice on keeping themselves and their family safe and healthy should reevaluate their life choices.

Zac Hall for 9to5Mac:

Pocket Casts is a cross-platform podcast player with apps on iOS, Android, the web, and even Windows Phone, and today Shifty Jelly released a major update to the iPhone and iPad version. Pocket Casts 6 is out today and includes loads of changes including a refreshed user interface, a dark theme, multitasking features on iPad including Picture-in-Picture and Split View, and much more.

Pocket Casts has been my go-to podcast player for a while now and while it always got the job done, the UI left much to be desired, specifically on iOS. The new app, built in Swift, doesn’t reinvent the wheel but does bring a much cleaner, modern, more comfortable look to the app. Rows are given greater margins, the app typeface has been switched and, as mentioned, they’ve included a dark mode option, which looks great.

Zac Hall for 9to5Mac:

iTunes in its current form can be a mess as a music player, but at least that tries to be its primary function; being a good podcast player is hardly the focus of iTunes. Aside from removing part of the bloat from iTunes, promoting podcast playback on the Mac to its own app would solve several existing problems.

It’s pretty clear at this point that podcast playback within iTunes is an afterthought. We’ve gotten by with shared controls and interfaces with iTunes music for a long time but it’s time to break podcasts out in the same way Apple did with iBooks years ago.

Podcasts are clearly something that Apple cares about, maybe with the rumoured iTunes overhaul coming at WWDC we’ll finally see something like an independent podcast application come to life on OS X.

Micah Singleton for The Verge:

Podcasts have finally made their way to Google Play Music, the company announced today in a blog post. Google began recruiting podcasters last October after it initially revealed plans for the service, and has managed to sign up a ton of podcasts, including major shows like Marc Maron’s WTF, Chris Hardwick’s The Nerdist, and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio, among others.

I was pretty excited about this announcement but I’ve had a ton of issues getting episodes to actually play. Also, there’s no ability (as far as I can tell) to mark episodes as played and I’m also not entirely sure how/if you’re notified when new episodes are available for listening.

Overall, this feels like a soft launch more than a fully developed release. It reminds me a lot of when Google initially launched Drive back in 2012 and people complained about the lack of features compared to services like Dropbox, which had been around for quite awhile at that point.

I’m sure Google’s take on podcasts will get there, it’ll just take some time to catch up. In the meantime, i’ll be sticking with Pocket Casts.