Here’s the deal. I actually like how podcasts were moved out from under the wing of the music player in IOS6. Listening to a podcast is an entirely different experience than listening to music. Having different controls is a good idea. Kudos to you Apple for figuring that out.
Having said that, I’m really mad right now. Overnight my phone nearly entirely drained my battery, as well as sucked down almost a GB of cellular data. As best as I can figure it, it’s because I *had* set my favorite podcasts to auto download. And so they did: over and over and over. I called AT&T and their suggestion was to backup and restore my phone. Why is that always the solution for everything? People, these aren’t PCs! But I digress…
So the Podcast app has some major bug in it that I have to manage by killing the app each time I’m done with it. Great. But that’s not even the most annoying feature. It’s the way that every old podcast that was ever available displays on my phone. This is entirely stupid. One of my favorite podcasts is the NPR podcast Fresh Air. There’s over 500 episodes available. A lot of Fresh Air is pop culture fluff that I ignore. On iTunes on my computer, I can easily remove all those Fresh Air’s that I don’t want to ever download so I have a nice clean list of the 20 or so ones that I’ll get around to listening to during those available moments.
However, on my phone, those unwanted podcasts are like zombies. They won’t die. In order to find anything to listen to, I have to scroll through all 500, and if I’m lucky, I might actually spot one of those that I’ve got saved to listen to. If I’m lucky. If I scroll too fast or too far, the podcast app bounces me back to the upper menu so I can start all over again. Congratulations Apple – you’ve made all my Fresh Air podcasts completely useless to me because I can never find one through the wave of zombie crap that I don’t want.
Fix this please and fast! I hate not loving my phone. Oh, and Apple you owe my $40 for overage fees on my cellular plan.