A Simple DIY Podcast App

The podcast app for nerds who love RSS

Last weekend, I wanted to generate a playlist of the latest episodes of all my favorite podcasts, so I could listen to them while cleaning. But I couldn’t find an easy way to do that. I’ve been using iTunes for podcasts for probably 8 years now. It’s slow and crashes a lot. But the final straw was realizing their smart playlist feature seemed incapable of just making that very simple playlist.

I thought about Spotify, but it’s also pretty slow on many of my devices, and doesn’t have some of the more niche podcasts. I tried a few others but couldn’t find one I really liked.

And I know people, like my boyfriend, who just want to download mp3s and listen to them on old-fashioned mp3 players.

So I figured I’d make my own bare bones podcast app. How long could it take? Spoiler: much longer than I expected. But I’m happy with how it came out, and what it does. Very simply, Just Podcasts visits every podcast feed you specify, and arranges the episodes in chronological order. I also added an audio function, so you can play the mp3s in the browser.

I’ve been an RSS fan since I started using the internet (RIP Google Reader) and one thing that excited me about building this was that Podcasting is a place where RSS is very much still alive. Every podcast I looked at had an…