Himalaya:Audiobooks & Podcasts

This app is great and far superior to the Apple podcast app I’ve been using for so long. It’s amazingly easy to get around, easy to find the podcast you’re looking for in you library, and it’s designed really well. I also really love that I get better recommendations from this app than on Apple podcast. I always see the same shows on Apple and nothing new. But this app isn’t without its bugs. The thing that annoys me the most is that it always starts playing what you’re listening to when you open the app which means you’ll be at work, unlock your phone, go to the app to search for a new show and as soon as it opens it starts playing a podcast for all to hear. It’s not too bad when your alone but it always happens to me public. Also when I pick an episode to listen to it will either play another episode that I didn’t choose or will start playing the episode at a random point so you have to start it from the beginning. Also I’ll be half way through a podcast, stop to listen to something else, and then come back to it it won’t remember where I was. It just plays it from the beginning again and I have to find where I was. Other than a few performance bugs I really love this app. I just want the developers to have a new update to fix them. Then they’d easily have a 5 star from me.

I really want to love this app. The UI is beautiful and seamless. However, it suffers from several problems that make the app almost unusable. For one, the time bar on the lock screen or control center is always wrong. Himalaya can say a podcast is 60 min, but the slider on the lock screen only goes up to 30 min, making it impossible to scrub to a later part of an episode outside of the Himalaya app. More recently, the app sometimes just stops showing any information at all. All the shows in my library and the explore page are still there, but clicking on any podcast just says there’s no episodes. In combination, these issues make the app largely unusable. I really love the appearance of the app, as well as the largest library I’ve seen outside of the Apple Podcasts app, but I can’t recommend it until these bugs are gone.

Switched over to exclusively using Himalaya over the Apple podcast app because it had become too frustrating to navigate. I like the app overall, but there are a few bugs that are driving me nuts. First, it crashes constantly. Usually while I’m trying to search for a new podcast or browsing discover to find a new podcast. Second, it will randomly start an episode in the middle when I’ve never listened to that episode before. This makes it a little difficult to distinguish if I’ve already started listening to something and moved on, or if it’s just the weird glitch and I should just restart the episode. Besides those two issues though I really like this app and the way it’s setup. It’s easy to find things and to get to new episodes, and I’ve officially switched over all my podcast listening to this platform. Wish it was slightly better, hoping there will be more updates that hammer out these minor flaws in what seems to be a promising app.