Breaker—The social podcast app

I really wanted to like Breaker—and to be fair, the social aspects of the app are the closest I’ve seen to what I want out of a podcast app. People don’t actually seem to be using those tools to be social yet, but that could just be an in progress network effect/critical mass thing. I run into too many bugs and confusing situations for me to recommend it to friends, though. My main complaint is that downloading episodes ahead of time rarely works out, which makes the app all but useless for me. I’m never certain when I open the app if I’m going to be able to listen to podcasts today.

Give me the podcast all Apple had out originally, and I’d be happy. Breaker is a great alternative to the app that Apple ruined- all my episodes download when they should and are easy to locate. My issue lies with being able to delete an episode after listening. The episode “disappears” from the playlist and you have to go into subscriptions to find it, and you still can’t do much with it there. If you don’t listen to all (or any) of an episode, it remains in the playlist, and you can swipe left to remove it from your playlist....but it’s not deleted from your phone (exists in subscription area). Not sure if I’m missing something that’s right in front of me, or if this was just overlooked. A welcomed feature would be to be able to share an episode with people not on Breaker- sometimes I would email myself the episode to know to come back to it, and sometimes i would like to share it with others (who don’t use Breaker). Being able to create multiple playlists would be a bonus, too!

Great app all around. Two things that could use some more work are the search function and more bug removal. The search itself isn’t the worst but sometimes it takes almost until the last letter of a podcast title for it to find the correct one, not very intuitive. The bugs can be a bit frustrating, some of the worst ones I get are toward the end of episodes that have been in a playlist for a while, they often will loop at random intervals. Three minutes will go by then that same 3 minutes will play once more. The absolute worst however is that your progress on an episode will often get deleted. This isn’t normally a huge issue, but with shows like Hardcore History that sometimes have nearly 3 hour episodes having to routinely scrub through to find my position is aggravating.

Switched to iPhone recently and have been having trouble finding a good podcast app (which seems absurd). This one is the best I’ve found but still has some annoying quirks. I like to download episodes since I travel a lot. This app adds episodes to my playlist, but it doesn’t always download them. Even when I force it to download and watch it complete the download, I will go back later and it will show that it isn’t downloaded. Where does it go? I just watched it complete the download. Frustrating! Also, I listen to most podcasts oldest to newest, but a few current event podcasts I want to listen to when they are released. This seems to confuse the app. Why is this so difficult?

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I downloaded this app to move away from other podcast apps. I love the layout and UI. I would rate this app higher, but my issue is that the pause and play button is not working on any other screen (home screen, pull down, car buttons, or Apple Watch now playing screen). When I do go back to app to get the podcast going again the last time I listened before pausing is not the same for when it starts up again. It is actually very behind depending on when the error occurred it could be that I am almost done with the podcast but in the podcast it shows that I am less than half of the way through. I apologize if I am not explaining this correctly, but it is an issue that I am continuously running into.