Podcatcher

Consumer and social

podcast player

SHOW HN2025

226points
85comments
#273of 3,837 in 2025
Top 8%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

12 positive, 17 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 10 critical, out of 39 comments about the project. Thread score +0.12.

Execution: 2 for, 6 againstIdea: 3 for, 1 againstDesign: 3 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 2 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Good design of website and app

    From 2 comments
    • Just want to say, I love the design of your website!
      hoofedear on HN
    • The app looks really good! Based on the title I thought it’d be something you made most as a testbed for Racket so I was surprised to see the app itself actually looks great :D I…
      jonathanyc on HN
  • Interesting use of Racket

    From 2 comments
    • Well done; will test and possibly switch. But, for me more importantly, using Racket for this is more really nice. Thanks for that.
      anonzzzies on HN
    • Racket has been on my bucket list of languages to learn. Seems really intriguing
      sghiassy on HN

Objections

  • Discover/search backend returns 502 errors and crashes

    From 4 comments
    • I’m getting an error going to the Discover tab and also when hitting “search” after typing a search term (newlines added): ``` string::1: bytes->jsexpr: bad input starting…
      philsnow on HN
    • Doesn't work! Clicking discover just shows a messagebox with a stack trace[1] - so I have no way of adding a podcast to try out the app. [1] Error string::1: bytes->jsexpr: bad…
      Humphrey on HN
    • A botched deploy that I didn't notice ended up crashing the server, which then failed to recover when the systemd unit tried to restart it (it couldn't bind the port and ran out…
      Bogdanp on HN
    • Sorry about that! Looks like the server got OOMKilled at one point and failed to recover. It should be back up now and I'll work on a fix.
      Bogdanp on HN
  • Subscribing is slow

    From 2 comments
    • feedback: it's slow (clicking on subscribe, etc)
      Hadriel on HN
    • Thanks for the feedback. Subscribing in particular is slow, especially for podcasts with lots of episodes, because it tries to save all the episode metadata locally, to avoid…
      Bogdanp on HN
  • Privacy concern over diagnostics tracking

    From 2 comments
    • > It's also free, has no ads or tracking, and it's local-first except for the podcast directory and sync. The app privacy label says it tracks diagnostics.
      sneak on HN
    • The app store labels are somewhat broad, but that refers to the error tracking that the app does. When an unhandled exception occurs in the app, that error is sent to Sentry.
      Bogdanp on HN
  • Private feeds not supported because server must fetch feed

    From 2 comments
    • Can it handle feeds that aren't available on the public internet? I have a personal feed that I can connect to over TailScale. But I've found that most podcast clients have a…
      jonathonlacher on HN
    • Yup, unfortunately Podcatcher works the same way and that explains why you'd be getting that error, since the server can't access your feed. That's certainly something that it…
      Bogdanp on HN

Requests

  • Per-podcast download settings

    From 2 comments
    • I don't know if this is a good place for feature requests, but the only thing keeping me from switching to this at at the moment is download settings per podcast. For example,…
      freeplay on HN
    • Thanks! That makes a lot of sense. It actually only downloads at most 2 episodes per podcast at a time, but that's still not great for your use case. I do plan to add per-podcast…
      Bogdanp on HN
  • Compress voices / volume normalization feature

    From 2 comments
    • "Boost voices" is a cool feature a lot of apps have, but what is really needed is a "compress voices" feature. So many podcasters speak loudly 75% of the time, but then trail off…
      strunz on HN
    • That's a great point! Shouldn't be hard to add.
      Bogdanp on HN
  • CarPlay support

    From 2 comments
  • Regex title filtering for downloads

    From 1 comment
    • I support a number of podcast creators on Patreon, and apparently they’ll (at some stage) allow creators to have multiple RSS feeds. Until then, I’d love to be able to regex…
      KristijanM13 on HN
  • Podcast 2.0 features like boosts and streaming sats

    From 1 comment
    • Any plans to implement podcast 2.0 features like boosts or sat streaming?
      astound473 on HN

Questions

  • How Racket runs on iOS

    From 1 comment
    • For those of unfamiliar with Racket, could you go over what it takes to run a Racket app on iOS?
      oidar on HN
  • Whether the app uses native APIs for networking and performance

    From 1 comment
    • > Database management > syncing with the backend server Do features like these, when implemented in Racket, consume more resources (battery, CPU, etc.) than if they were…
      jbhoot on HN
  • Whether feeds not on the public internet are supported

    From 1 comment
    • Can it handle feeds that aren't available on the public internet? I have a personal feed that I can connect to over TailScale. But I've found that most podcast clients have a…
      jonathonlacher on HN

Alternatives named

  • Overcast

    From 2 comments
    • You don't need two apps – Overcast does all of this.
      mplewis on HN
    • This is great! I just switched over from Overcast. Very nice and simple interface, no clutter, and not a ton of unnecessary features. Love it.
      baggachipz on HN
  • Pocket Casts

    From 1 comment
    • I support a number of podcast creators on Patreon, and apparently they’ll (at some stage) allow creators to have multiple RSS feeds. Until then, I’d love to be able to regex…
      KristijanM13 on HN
  • Apple Podcasts

    From 1 comment
    • I did not use this app yet, but I want to share my issue with the current native podcast player in iOS. Some podcasts are news related and require hearing the latest episode.…
      nashashmi on HN
  • Castamatic

    From 1 comment
    • Yeah, based on Bitcoin lightning (which is quite different from normal bitcoin) meaning no transaction costs and very low energy use. Basically it happens off-chain until someone…
      teekert on HN
  • Fountain

    From 1 comment
    • Yeah, based on Bitcoin lightning (which is quite different from normal bitcoin) meaning no transaction costs and very low energy use. Basically it happens off-chain until someone…
      teekert on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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