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.
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.
How is antenna pod?