iOS: When it first launched, we were fans of the simplicity of Castro, which was great for people who only listened to a handful of podcasts. Now, with Castro 2, the app rethinks organisation again, this time putting the focus on episodes instead of subscriptions.
Unlike most podcast managers, Castro 2 works more like an email app that focuses on organising a queue of specific episodes instead of subscriptions. That’s most evident in Castro’s three main screens, Inbox, Queue and Archive. Each section works as you’d expect, with the inbox being all the episodes of podcasts you subscribe to, the queue being an ever-growing list of episodes you want to listen to and the archive is a massive list of everything. It’s a clever system for those of us who might want to listen to a single episode of something a friend recommends without subscribing to the podcast outright.
Castro also sports a few features you’d expect from a podcast app, including a dark mode, storage optimisation and a sharing system that makes it easy to share an episode with friends. There’s also a favourite button so you can save episodes easily. Castro lacks some fancier features of other podcasts managers like cutting out silence, or starting a podcast at a specific time. An app like Overcast is still the best podcast manager for most people, but Castro’s episode-focused approach fills a wide enough niche that it’s worth a look if you don’t like how most managers tend to focus on subscriptions instead of your queue.
Castro 2 ($7.99) [iTunes App Store]
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