I’ve been warming up to switching to GrapheneOS for months. Last month I bought a Pixel 8 (which is the buggiest effing phone I’ve ever owned, good job Google). I’ve just been waiting to have the bandwidth.
But with Google sunsetting Google Podcasts, I’ve decided to make time next week. Podcasts are a MAJOR part of my daily functioning.
The problem is for me that it usually downloads to some obscure folder, not to where I want to save and archive my podcasts.
Any podcast app I’ve used saves them wherever it needs to be able to read them.
I think saving and archiving podcasts is a niche use-case. I’ve jumped between apps and I just go resubscribe to the shows I want. If I need to find an old episode, I just go to that show and stream or download that episode.
I can’t think of a reason why I’d need to keep those files stored anywhere.
If you don’t really care about the podcast then that’s OK, but if I like a podcast I want a permanent offline copy to relisten to if the podcast goes offline. I guess I’m a bit of a data-hoarder and that’s niche, but simply being able to save a file you download to where you want I think should be a standard feature, there’s no need for an extra layer of abstraction.
Looks like AntennaPod can do just that
AntennaPod is one of the better ones but it doesn’t beat the good old-fashioned “Save As” where you can put it wherever you like. I don’t want a podcast app to manage my files, a file-manager does that.
Hard disagree. I’d much prefer it manage the files for me. I can’t see a reason why you’d need to be constantly changing folder structure enough to warrant managing that manually.
I’m not changing folder structure constantly, I just want it somewhere sensible where I can find it.
So what’s wrong with deciding that, and then letting the app manage it from there?
It’s an unnecessary layer of abstraction that solves a problem that never existed. If you have a lot of podcasts it’s nice to be able to organise them in a directory structure that makes sense to you, not necessarily what the app wants. Also podcast file names aren’t always easily sortable or even human-readable so you’ll want to rename them as you save them.