---
title: "Back to Overcast"
date: 2026-06-04
tags: post
---

In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast.

None of my gripes with Overcast have been fixed, or even assuaged. But paper cuts are less annoying than other forms of pain. If I really wanted to, I could sit down for thirty minutes and assemble a meaningful list of everything that bothers me about the first-party app — but instead I'll present only the two that are actually load-bearing.

The first, and the trivial one: there is no easy way to search for episodes within a given podcast feed. I'm not talking about clever, fancy, transcription-based search — just searching by title. Apple Podcasts' search functionality has many oddities, but this one is bizarre, and it is crucial for me whenever I'm trying to dredge up an old episode. This probably reveals something idiosyncratic about my listening habits: there are very few podcasts I subscribe to — exactly one of them technical — that aren't evergreen.

The second point is less about features and more about existential positioning. Compare the home screen for Apple Podcasts to the home screen for Overcast. One of these apps is designed with the primary goal of letting me listen to the podcasts to which I've subscribed. The other is designed with the primary goal of getting me to listen to a podcast to which I have not.

I could make grand sweeping gestures about how this reflects various pricing models and success criteria — and maybe I'll do that in some future essay — but I actually don't care about the bigger picture. My point is narrower: Apple Podcasts pursues goals that result in a worse experience for me.

And so I'm not back on Overcast out of any solidarity for a fellow independent developer, nor because of some vague, abstract sense of it being capital-B Better. I'm back on Overcast because I like it.