Google Podcasts 12+

Reinstall fixed all my problems. No more crashes.
—-
Precious 3-star review:
I moved to Google podcasts from Apple podcasts because playlist was not working. Google requires me to add each episode to playlist manually, which isn’t ideal but still better than Apple. But my app keeps crashing. I start a podcast, put phone in pocket, and 30 seconds later playback stops. I’m not accidentally hitting stop, because I cannot press play from control center. The podcast app has closed and I need to re-open and press play again. I’ll uninstall and reinstall this app before finding a new podcast player.

I guess this app is fine. But once you have subscribed to more than 20 or so podcasts it becomes tedious to find a podcast that you have subscribed to. I think I have over 100 podcasts that I subscribe to at the moment and the only way to organize them is in one straight line. This is embarrassing for Google. Other podcast apps that you organize by tag or by category or by folder. My other main concern is that it is not possible to limit your search by language. I suppose Google thinks it has such an amazing search algorithm that all you need is one search box. ButThis is far too limiting and its algorithm is constrained by the experience of its own developers, Most of which I assume are monolingual. Or at least only searching in one language. Do they think I want to change the language of my phone in order to tell the search box in my Podcasts app what languages I’m looking for? This is ridiculous.

I don't remember the app always being so buggy but in 2022 I've been having bad luck with it. The app crashes after a few seconds every other time I launch it and start to play something, having to then relaunch the app.

Many relaunches for specific shows lose the last played position, so I'm constantly fumbling with the audio scrubber, or eventually realizing the app has gone too far back in a track that I'm hearing parts of an episode over and over again, or I lose the last played position altogether, forced to restart episodes from the very beginning.

Also seeing with specific shows that if I download an episode and add it to my queue, it fails to load the download when it comes time to play. So I have nothing playing for whatever’s next in my queue if I’m in an area with poor reception. I have to undo the download for the episode in order for the on demand audio to then actually play. Please, dev team, help iOS users out.