This is great! Major refactors like this are always such a difficult prospect for a number of reasons, and take real dedication and love. For people doing this for open source like Antenna Pod, my gratitude for you is immense!
Interestingly though, depending on your perspective can be good or bad. For example, the improvement for new contributors and for the people doing the refactor will be huge and lovely. So much easier to work in!
For the people who were familiar with the tangled mess before though, it can be a real set back. I've been in that boat before, and it basically wipes away all your prior knowledge and puts you at least back at square 1, sometimes at like -15 because you have to unlearn all the old stuff and that can be really hard to do. If all the older contributors were gone then this is not really a problem, but if I were one of them I probably wouldn't contribute anymore, not out of irritiation or spite or anything like that, just that it's too much of an uphill battle and there are other projects where I could contribute more efficiently. Definitely not a reason not to do the refactor, but it is something I had never considered before until I was on that side of it.
So if the only contributors are older contributors, and they are still around, it can be difficult. If the older contributors have moved on or are the ones doing the refactoring, or if most contributions are from newer members, then it's a huge win.
>AntennaPod doesn’t need a lot of money. Our (annual) costs are already covered by our existing donation funds. Therefore, we’d much prefer it if you
donate to your favorite podcast(er), orhelp us with a non-monetary contribution.
Glad to have a FOSS podcast app. I switched to Antennapod after Google Podcasts shut down. I have about a dozen podcasts I listen to, half of them from Patreon RSS feeds. Works great!
I had to use an iPhone for a month when I lost my Android phone so I tried Spotify for podcasts. I can't describe how bad it is, impossible to control what you want to play, complete garbage. AntennaPod is an example of what software can be when you remove greed from the equation.
I miss AntennaPod from Android. It's on a list of about 5 things.
Having said that, Overcast for iOS is great. The main missing feature vs. AntennaPod is that I can't browse + select podcast episodes using the job wheel / touchscreen on my non-CarPlay car.
That feature barely works with Apple Music (and not at all for other first-party or third-party apps), so I suspect it's an iOS issue more than an Overcast issue.
If you're on an iPhone then Apple's own Podcasts app is what you want. It's basically identical to AntennaPod in normal usage, and that's a good thing.
I stand corrected! I installed the latest AntennaPod build from f-droid in order to give specific examples but had no idea that AntennaPod had gotten so much better. The last contact I had with it was an indescribably miserable experience
Still waiting for them to catch up and join the revolution of sat streaming, boostagrams , and other Podcasting 2.0 features.
Still my app of choice (due to F-Droid availability and many years of playback history).
Great article - it's always interesting to see refactoring tools like that used in real life. I'm a daily user of AntennaPod and it is the best podcast app I've ever used.
> Over at AntennaPod, we often get requests and comments about synchronization of listening data. The existing gPodder API has some fundamental flaws and misses capabilities. So we took the initiative together with Funkwhale to develop a new standard to sync your listening data. What do we do differently & why, where are we at, and what calls are in the planning?
I've encountered this kind of poor encapsulation in other open source projects quite frequently. It's often one of the main blockers to contributing, for me.
Congratulations to AntennaPod for spending three years to clean this up.
I absolutely loved AntennaPod back when I had an Android phone -- I actually never really "attended" to it though: I installed it, it worked, never gave me any issue. Now that I own an iPhone, I really miss having a quality app like AntennaPod.
I love love love AntennaPod. Top 5 apps for me and there's a GPodder Sync app for Nextcloud so you can easily use it across devices with no third party clouds.
How is antenna pod? My experience with these kinds of open-source apps aimed at end users is that unless there's any kind of actual product or design direction saying yes/no to every little thing someone in the community wants to add, it turns into a bloated mess for everyone except for the community experts in open-source podcast apps.
It's pretty much always developers that are the main contributors in communities like this and they want everything to be configurable. So you get things like a bunch of inputs and sliders for configuring various buffer sizes and timeouts and whatnot.
I use Pocket Casts and love it because it's simple and looks nice and works great.
For the most part I like it but there are some annoyances in queue/download management and playlists. They're known issues that they are working on. Currently there's just one queue which can get extremely annoying when mixing episodic and news podcasts. They're working on supporting multiple queues which should be a great solution. I don't think that feature has been released yet (but I could be wrong). Hopefully this restructuring makes things easier.
Podcasts are just syndicated audio feeds and in that respect, Antennapod is pretty serviceable. That said I've tried it a few times and always bounce off for two issues:
1. If you want to discover new podcasts, you will have to do that somewhere else.
2. Playlisting is not as good as others.
If you follow a few podcasts and aren't too opinionated about it then AntennaPod is a perfectly good app. I also use pocketcasts as I am married to my different filters and ability to sync playback status to PC.
One is that there is not a simple way to add an episode to the queue. The main button is to start streaming. I wish I could change the stream button to add to the queue.
On Android Auto, when it starts streaming the next item in the queue, now playing screen changes to the the queue list. I wish it always stays on Now Playing screen.
I moved from Pocket Casts (which I really did like) to AntennaPod sometime after the a question of the former. I've experienced what you describe in some other apps, but not AntennaPod. It is lighter on some features as other replies have described, but the core experience is really solid and straightforward.
Interestingly though, depending on your perspective can be good or bad. For example, the improvement for new contributors and for the people doing the refactor will be huge and lovely. So much easier to work in!
For the people who were familiar with the tangled mess before though, it can be a real set back. I've been in that boat before, and it basically wipes away all your prior knowledge and puts you at least back at square 1, sometimes at like -15 because you have to unlearn all the old stuff and that can be really hard to do. If all the older contributors were gone then this is not really a problem, but if I were one of them I probably wouldn't contribute anymore, not out of irritiation or spite or anything like that, just that it's too much of an uphill battle and there are other projects where I could contribute more efficiently. Definitely not a reason not to do the refactor, but it is something I had never considered before until I was on that side of it.
So if the only contributors are older contributors, and they are still around, it can be difficult. If the older contributors have moved on or are the ones doing the refactoring, or if most contributions are from newer members, then it's a huge win.