iOS 18.2 improves Apple’s Podcasts app, but my biggest complaint is unchanged

Apple’s Podcasts app has received solid updates recently, such as Killer Transcript Feature–More features are coming to iOS 18.2. But all these improvements came while the core application problem was not solved.

Two new features in iOS 18.2 improve podcast discovery

Let’s start with the good.

Apple Podcasts in iOS 18.2 has two improvements for podcast discovery.

1. You can now choose your favorite podcast categories, which should improve podcast recommendations in the app.
2. The app’s search page is now personalized to highlight categories and curated collections that better suit your listening habits.

Both changes are great additions to the app, and they complement each other.

For example, once you select your favorite podcast categories, those categories will immediately appear more prominently in search.

I’m all for making podcast apps better, but despite this year’s upgrades, core parts of the app experience still feel bad to me.

I’m talking about the Up Next interface in Home.

Apple Podcasts’ core functionality feels broken

For those unfamiliar with Apple’s Podcasts app, Up Next works very similarly to Apple’s other media apps.

• In music, this is your go-to part
• In TV, it’s now called Keep Watching, which contains shows and movies you’ve been watching or saved for later
• In Books it’s called Continue and includes all the books you’ve read

In every app, you’ll find it at the top of the Home tab: the most prominent part of the app’s default tabs.

Apple Podcasts makes Up Next the primary way for users to play podcasts from the shows they care about.

In other words, unless you’re constantly searching for and discovering new podcasts, the vast majority of your use of the app will involve interacting with Up Next.

It aims to be a one-stop hub for podcasts.

But since Apple adopted the Up Next system a few years ago, it has had some shortcomings that make it a pain to use.

Up Next Five reasons to care

Here’s a quick overview of five issues that confuse me:

• information density: You can only see one and a half podcasts at a time, so it’s not easy to outline everything you can listen to.
• Slide slowly: Making the above problem worse is that you can’t swipe quickly to browse podcasts in Up Next – forcing staggered swipes slows you down.
• Hide episodes: If a show has multiple unaired episodes, there’s no way to know this in “Up Next.” It only shows the latest episodes, with no visual indication of how many other episodes are available.
• messy feed: Most of the podcasts I listen to involve shows that I care about. However, when a new show recommends an episode, I listen and then expect to finish it. Unfortunately, the next episode of the show was then added to my “next” feed, cluttering it up. Apple should know that if I want to continue listening to more episodes, I will follow the show.
• add to next: On a related note, when I listen to a one-off episode (for a show I don’t follow), it’s surprisingly difficult to add the episode to “Up Next.” Podcasts allows you to play the next episode, or save it, but neither of these actions reliably adds it to “Next,” so I usually forget the episode exists. I recently noticed an improvement when saving episodes, so hopefully Apple will implement a fix.

wrap up

I’ve been using Apple Podcasts for years, so I know there are ways to navigate to other parts of the app that solve many of the above problems. But that’s not the point.

Up Next aims to be a one-stop hub for users’ podcasts, but it’s currently doing a terrible job at it.

What do you think of iOS 18.2’s changes to podcasts? How do you feel about “what’s next”? Let us know in the comments.

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