As more people continue the trend of cutting the cord and ditching cable TV they have begun to look elsewhere for their entertainment needs. Whether this comes in the form of video games, a hobby, or other forms of video entertainment (such as Hulu, Netflix, and podcasts). Pocket Casts has become incredibly popular on mobile devices with over a million downloads on Android while maintaining the #3 position in the News category on iOS. The folks behind the application have just rolled out a major update to version 7, but the reception hasn’t been very good so far.
Pocket Casts launched an open beta program back in June of last year. This enabled the team to offer beta updates to the public while gathering feedback and making changes before the update got pushed to the stable channel. This remained small and virtually uneventful until November when they pushed version 7 of the update to anyone who had applied for the open beta. So the team has been working on this update for at least 4 months and it comes with a Material Design overhaul, the ability to archive podcasts, a tagging system, higher information density, and more.
In the blog post, the goal is said to have made the most basic of tasks quicker and easier to do. Such as adding the ability to play a podcast without subscribing to it and a redesigned episodes list where you can see what’s downloaded, what’s coming up next, and the ability to swipe to the right over a list to reveal options for “Play Next” and “Play Last.”
However, in both the Google Play Store as well as the iOS App Store we are seeing a large number of 1-star reviews specifically because of the latest update. It’s no secret that a lot of people dislike change, but these reviews are claiming that “simple actions” require “significantly more” taps and, at least for now, the menus feel less intuitive than they first did. These negative reviews could be temporary and overblown which will result in them dying down, or it could mean the team didn’t listen to open beta feedback as much as they should have.
We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out. If you’re a Pocket Casts user then we would love to hear what you have to think about the new update.
Pocket Casts ($3.99, Google Play) →
Source: Pocket Casts
Refference - xdadevelopers.com
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