I think most people can agree that although staying off your phone while driving should be done 100% of the time, there will be the once in a while where you have to tap a slip or pause button while on the road. If you're driving and you need to hit one button in the app, you expect it to be a 2 second procedure, yet it is not, because as soon as you interact with the app after not doing so for more than 5-10 minutes, you will be harassed with 10 second ads that are purposely hard to close out of, and purposely put in places that are the most distracting (going to your listen later will prompt it, as well as going to your currently playing podcast, aka the 2 most used functions while listening). I then have to pullover to do what originally should have been, again, a 2 second procedure at most. Many people who are more impulsive will not pull over, and instead will probably battle with the ads with their hand still on the steering wheel, and these developers know this. They know they are creating an absolute road hazard with where they place these ads and what they look like and it's extremely disheartening to see no regard for safety or their users to this degree. You don't deserve to have an app this functional/useful to so many people, you are not responsible with the power.

For years I have been using this app and after the most recent update, I couldn’t be more frustrated with it. The new interface makes it more inconvenient to access the podcasts I had subscribed to and listen to on the daily. Being someone who is not always looking for the newest podcasts, I very often dive into different episodes that are not the latest. I suppose only ever being caught up is what is expected of the now short term attention spans people have. I have to go through a series of “Whats new” options passing as if watching someone’s stories from Instagram or Snapchat. I can’t simply select the podcast which would normally direct me right to the list of episodes within the podcast I had subscribed to. WHY?! Not only does it take forever to access the page I had subscribed to, it doesn’t even play. I waited over 20 minutes for an episode to load thinking it might be my service, internet connection, or my phone in general, so I shut my phone off and tried other routes and still nothing. After using this app, I am entirely and completely over it. It’s irritating enough that people who think they’re doing better by upgrading something and giving in to the modern era of thinking is frustrating.

I have used the heck out of this app and it is mostly awesome. It just has a weird quirk where podcasts don’t automatically play the next episode. It used to. I thought maybe they’d changed that in an update, but I just went back and caught up on another podcast with 4 new eps since the last time I’d listened, and those DID start right off—when one episode ended, the next one would start playing after only a second or two. Most of the time, when one episode ends, it moves to the next episode and just stops. I have to hit play for it to start loading the ep, wait a few secs for it to stop loading and say “error,” turn my wifi off and back on again, go back to the app, hit “play” again, and usually do that a few more times while I wait 5-10 min for it to download the entire episode. Then I have to go to the podcast’s page, scroll to find the last ep I’d listened to, hit play on THAT, then go to the one I just loaded and hit play on that. Then it will play. I know my connection speed is slow, but it does this when I’m connected in other locations with better speeds. I was just resigned to this weird buggy thing until I just checked up on that other podcast and it actually started playing the next ep right away without nannying and cajoling, and before it had downloaded the whole thing. Is that just happening to me?