Add the ability to preview episodes before subscribing
When looking for a podcast on a particular topic it is hard to know what it will be like without seeing the list of episodes. To view the episodes, however, the user has to subscribe to the podcast. The user then has to switch to their list of subscribed podcasts and find the relevant podcast before viewing the episodes. This is a lot of extra steps when instead the episodes could be previewed before subscribing which would help the user decide if they actually want to subscribe
This feature has just been released in v3.16
From the search results press on the podcast (or long press), the select ‘Episodes’, you will then have the list of the podcast episodes, from which you can stream/download without having to subscribe first
BTW: I forgot to add this feature in the Discover podcasts screen, but it will be done later this week
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@Paul
Thanks for the feedback. Yes this is the intended behavior. The podcast is always created and will contain the episodes you retrieved, but once the episode has been read, everything will be automatically removed (unless the episode has been marked as favorite).
It takes time to retrieve the episodes because the app needs to connected to the podcast server to extract the content from the RSS feed, but usually it takes ~1s for a 50 episodes podcast.
Yes you're right I forgot to add this feature to the Discover podcasts screens.
I will add this in the next version. Thanks for letting me know ! -
Paul commented
Got the beta, thanks for implementing this :)
It works well, but here is some feedback.
There is a noticeable wait to load the list of episodes.
If you listen without subscribing it still adds the podcast to your podcasts section. Maybe this is the desired outcome, but it could result in many 1-episode podcasts clogging up the podcast section after a while.
Finally, are you planning to also add this feature to the 'Discover' section?
Thanks again, I appreciate that the feature has been added :)
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Paul commented
Great news! Thanks Xavier and thanks everyone for the votes!
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Anonymous commented
Great idea.