I am a university professor who likes to read books or articles. I’ve hesitated to move to the podcast platforms, but I’ve done so out of necessity. Over the last few years I have found mainstream news to be very shallow in their reporting of current events. As a former devoted 6:00 news watcher, I have switched to the podcast platform to get in depth information that is reliable and based on facts instead of propaganda or lies. There have been a few podcasts that I came across in my search and found to be “okay” but the Meidas+ stands out above and beyond my expectation! What I appreciate is that Ben is a former attorney who has trial experience. He knows how to research information and is able to understand the legal ramifications of what is happening in our current US political chaos. He is not afraid to state the facts and can do so with clarity. With everything that is going on in the world it is tough for me to make sense out of nonsense - and for Ben and his team, they do an amazing job of making sense of all the nonsense. I have found this podcast to be my favorite! I cannot recommend it enough. Well worth the switch from the “nightly news” format.

This app is basically the reason I’ve had an iPhone for years. Recently it has gotten increasingly buggy and unreliable, and reliability is what was always best about Apple products; they just worked. About a year ago I started having problems with the app downloading the wrong podcast, I would download podcasts A, B, and C, but it would play A, B, and A. I would have to delete podcast C and redownload it later to get it to play C, because it had actually downloaded A and labeled it as C. More recently I’ve been having the additional problem of the app constantly forgetting what I asked it to play next. I order the episodes A, B, C, D, E, F; and back in the olden days it would just play those podcasts in that order unless I told it otherwise. Nowadays, the app will play A and then play A again, or maybe skip to C, or maybe just stop altogether, sometimes it will even start playing older episodes of A that I’ve already listened to. Occasionally when I pause a show and then hit play again it will start playing a completely different podcast. When these problems occur, if I check the Playing Next list it will show that it has been completely changed or forgotten, but sometimes if I go to another podcast and add it to the playlist it will restore the playlist I created with the new addition. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app which didn’t help. I tried contacting Apple for help which is now basically useless, so that didn’t help either.

While I generally find the app to be clear and easy to use, there are some critical bugs with downloads. For serial shows which have to be played in order, while the podcast creator can designate that as the intended play order, the Podcasts app doesn’t recognize it for downloads. There is no option to download the “next” set of episodes, but there is a bug with the strings. When you switch to, for example, “download 3 most recent” and then go back, the string on the outer menu is “download next 3 episodes”. You can go in and out of the menu and it will change back and forth between “next” and “most recent”. In any case, whichever you choose, it just downloads the most recent. I’m on episode 3 of a story podcast that is marked as needing to be listened to in order, and download “next/most recent 3” downloads episodes 11-13. There is simply no way to get it to download 3-5, or even just 3. This is frustrating enough that I’m deducting 2 stars. There is another flaw that has caused me to remove another star. You cannot mark a podcast series as “played up to this point”. If I’ve listened to a series on another app and am hundreds of episodes in, I can’t switch over to this app and mark those first 200 as already played. I have to do every episode manually, which is infuriating if I, again, want to listen to episodes in order.

Someone before me who also gave this app 1 star said if u long press your screen, a little list pops up and u can click “helpful”, “unhelpful”, something else, but please click on helpful so more people see and MAYBE they will try to fix something. Anything. I listen to podcasts all day long. I work alone and it passes my time, I’ve done it for years. I left this app to go to stitcher, then had to come back. It is so much worse. How on earth does this app have almost 5 stars? First of all, some of the podcasts in my library say “episode temporarily unavailable” when I click on older (sometimes current) episodes. It is happening more and more lately. I can listen to an episode then the next day, all of the episodes are temporarily unavailable, or some are, it is sooooo frustrating! And what happened to “play next”?! That was something I used constantly and now it is gone! Why??? Your queue has totally changed and automatically plays unplayed episodes of whatever podcast I am listening to?? Why did u start doing that?? It makes no sense. I could go on and on. Seriously, how complicated can this app be to maintain let alone improve?? You are Apple for gods sake. There are so many improvements and additions u should be able to do with no problem, but u can’t keep it at the sub par level it always has been, let alone improve it by adding user friendly and interactive features. Between this and the nightmare you call Siri, I can’t figure out why anyone wants to deal with anything Apple anymore.