The $3.99 price of admission does need to be taken into consideration, but for the amount of polish and features Pocket Casts comes with, $3.99 is a steal.ĭownload: Pocket Casts ($3.99) (opens in new tab) What do you think? With that said, if Google Assistant controls aren't important to you, Pocket Casts easily offers more features, a better thought-out design, and will be getting a huge revamp later this year to make it even better. However, if you're someone that has a Google Home and would rather use your voice to listen to your favorite shows rather than fumble with a mobile app, Google Podcasts is an excellent choice.ĭownload: Google Podcasts (free) (opens in new tab) Google Podcasts offers a very basic in-app experience that's functional but lacks some key features we've come to love from competing services. Final thoughtsĪlthough both of these apps aim to do the same thing, they're very different in their approach to doing so.

Google Podcasts is completely free to download, but on the other hand, you'll need to shell out $3.99 to get Pocket Casts on your phone.įurthermore, if you want to access Pocket Casts on your computer, you'll need to pay another $9 to access its web client. When it comes to price, this is where Google gets a big advantage. Other Pocket Casts goodies include two dark themes, advanced notification settings, syncing across your Pocket Casts account, and easier podcast discovery with the ability to find new shows by category, network, trending, and more.Īlso, while Pocket Casts may not be integrated with the Google Assistant, you can cast it to any of your Google Home speakers and/or home groups made in the Google Home app. The Pocket Casts home screen shows all of the podcasts you're currently subscribed to and you can quickly reorder their appearance by podcast name, episode release date, manually configure the layout with drag and drop controls, and even change the grid size to see more (or less) on your screen at once.īoth apps allow you to download individual episodes, but only Pocket Casts makes it possible to manually download all unplayed episodes and auto-download new ones as they're released. Pocket Casts still offers more features and user-customization out of the box. For all the things Google Podcasts gets right, however, Pocket Casts still reigns supreme when it comes to the in-app experience.

Pocket casts