It probably won’t surprise you to know that when you email and tweet at us, our amazing support people collate those requests so that we can see how many people are asking for different features. When it comes time to do a new release we look across these lists to see what makes sense to release in an update along with all the other things we have planned. On iOS, one thing stood out loud and clear. Those of you, like me, with Apple Watch’s on your wrists wanted to take your podcasts to more places, without needing to be tethered to your phone. Well today is your day! Turn your aspirational phone-less jogs, walks and rides into reality with our 7.9 update.
Stand Alone Apple Watch Playback
For Pocket Casts Plus subscribers, our watch app is now strong enough to stand on its own. If you’ve got a WiFi or cellular connection you can now view your subscribed podcasts, filters and files right on your watch. Even better you can download or stream them with just a few taps. Your Up Next and playback progress is of course synced automatically across all the platforms you use Pocket Casts on. I’ve always wondered how often I’d use this in practice vs it being an aspirational feature, but over the last month of testing I’ve taken many phone free walks with podcasts playing in my ears. It’s amazing just how liberating leaving your phone at home can be!
One other quick note, again from our amazing support team. They tell me that if, in the course of liberating yourself you instead find yourself entangled by non-existent headphone cords, then you can extricate yourself from both this terrible analogy and your predicament by checking out our user guide.
New Theme: Radioactivity
Have you been pleading for a pipboy? Do you go ga-ga for a geiger counter? Craving a cathode ray? Then our new Radioactivity theme is for you! Yes, as you probably noticed we did go a bit OTT, but it’s worth it. This is a Pocket Casts Plus only theme, because those are some of the most OTT people we know.
New Icons
We know home screens are a very personal thing. Some of you arrange them by functionality. Some of you seemingly at random, but the people we love best, are those among you that arrange them by colour. To those people we present our latest 4 new icons:
So Much More
There’s so many other great things bundled into this release. We’ve made huge improvements to our Trim Silence algorithm, making it more invisible than ever before. We’ve made many accessibility improvements to make our app much easier to use with VoiceOver and other accessibility technologies. Heck we even replaced Google’s Chromecast dialog with our own because we, like you, got sick of them not being able to dark theme their way out of a wet paper bag.
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