You’re actually understanding my issues quite well 🙂
The “keep updated” works, but I try to keep it to twice a day to have my battery last longer. So I manually trigger in-between. It’s a natural consequence of the technical choice, really.
As for the “Enqueue downloaded”, I stream everything as I have a massive mobile data plan. Due to this, I can stream a lot but I still have to deal with a separation between inbox/queue.
Thanks for those suggestions, I’m sure they’ll be of help for others that’s not part of my edge case 😁
I was a pocketcast user for years, switched to antennapod a few months ago. Here’s what’s bothering me:
- Antennapod has a weird separation between new episodes (inbox) and what you’re listening to now (queue). PC has that abstracted away where you only have to check one place for your podcasts.
- There is no simple service to sync your subscriptions and listen progress. Gpoddersync is basically abandoned and the protocol lacks features. Hopefully this will change with openpodcastAPI, but they haven’t managed to secure funding yet.
- I’ve been spoilt by having a server doing the heavy lifting of refreshing my podcasts. It’s a minor annoyance that I need to wait approx. 1.5 second per feed to refresh. It’s just the way it is.
There are also things that antennapod does better:
- chapters actually works in AP.
- episode pictures also works in AP, PC only showed the static image of the feed.
- search is just as good as PC.
- its FOSS and hopefully resistant to enshittification (unless all producers go into a closed ecosystem like Spotify tried with their recent purchases of pod-studios).
Best of luck from another pod-nerd.
If you want something hosted with full privacy, yet importable in the standard calendar apps, then I don’t think you’ll find anything for the time being.
Protonmail and tutanota both provide full privacy and are hosted options, but they require their own apps since they want to ensure reliable E2EE. I suppose you either need to re-evaltuate your requirements or wait for a suiitable product to be launched.
For what end do you want to make your choice?
Like many said, whatsapp has a huge userbase, which is the foundation for a IM-app. However, telegram totally blows the compitision out of the water when it comes to features / UI / API access. But there are other alternatives - depending on your usercase: Signal - not as userfriendly, but the encryption and meta-data retention is unpararelled. Matrix-chat - even less userfriendly than Signal, but does match the API access of Telegram and a huge amount of clients, which can satisfy most user-needs (even outside of traditional IM:ing).
Do note - Telegram is not encrypted by default. This was a conscious design of the company running it, so you can easily access your chats accross different devices. And they use a home-made encryption protocol, which is a very bad idea. So don’t rely on Telegram for anything that remotely requires confidentiality.
If I want a simple chat protocol, I use IRC or XMPP. These are battle proven by time. If I want a really secure protocol, I use Signal or Matrix. These are endored by many security experts who their shit when they assess protocols, crypto and solutions.
SimpleX may be a good alternative for anonymous communication, but there is plenty options out there. Considering how many startups are funded by cheap VC money, and the business model is always “provide something awesome, and once you have enough traction - enshittify it” makes me very weary of investing myself in new solutions no matter how open-source the are.
I may sound bitter and skeptic, but I’ve seen this pattern has been repeated many times over.