Version 7 for Android has been out for 2 weeks now and we have had a lot of feedback. Many of you like the changes and appreciate the new features like Up Next syncing between devices, archiving episodes instead of having to mark as played and playing podcasts without subscribing first. On the other hand, some of you have indicated that the change was unexpected, version 6 was working fine for you and version 7 came along and changed the way things worked. We understand it takes time to adjust to change but also recognise that we each interact with tools in different ways. We’ve listened to what you’ve said about this and today we released 7.0.2 to address many of these concerns.
To start, 7.0.2 brings back multi select which you can use to download, add to up next, mark as played or archive episodes. When you use it for adding episodes to up next, it will even queue them in the order you selected. To activate it, simply long press on an episode in your podcast or filter list. From here you can select exactly which episodes you want, before performing the 4 available actions on them. You can additionally long press again to bring up options to select all above or below.
Another change we’ve heard you loud and clear on is downloads not being at the top of a podcast anymore. I would like to give you some context behind this change. In version 6 downloads weren’t at the top of a podcast, unplayed episodes were. The app used to mark all but the latest episode as played when you first subscribed. We changed this because a really common confusion point in version 6 was “Why do you mark a whole podcast as played when you subscribe? I never played these episodes and now it’s hard to figure out what I have played and what I haven’t!”. As you can imagine this generated lots of support requests to us from many confused customers. What we didn’t realise is that some of you relied on this behaviour, so that when you tapped download, the episode would be marked as unplayed, then moved to the top of your podcast. We agree that’s a really handy feature to have so we’ve implemented a more explicit version of it in this update. We are pleased to say that showing downloaded episodes at the top of a podcast is back in 7.0.2. We also thought, “why stop there?” and added grouping options by played status (unplayed/played) and season as well. This means that whether you’re listening to a seasonal show (like Serial) or something more news like, you can choose per podcast how you’d like it grouped. For those who prefer to group all of their podcasts in the same way, there is global setting you can configure.
We’ve also fixed a ton of bugs that you’ve reported, so thank you for them. If something doesn’t seem right to you please do email in to our support team through the app (here’s how/where to do this), which will attach a debug log for us to help diagnose the issue and get it fixed. Every piece of information helps!
7.0.2 is just the beginning, we continue to read all of your feedback and are hard at work on the next update already. There are exciting things coming in the future!
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