Next Up - A Podcast Alarm

This app doesn’t do the one thing I want it to do. It won’t play my news app in the morning, despite having automatic downloads on. I have my backup alarm set as “The Muezzin”, and it won’t even play that. Instead, it plays random music from my Apple Music app. It’s very confusing walking up to Katy Perry’s “Firework” when you’re expecting a slow, gradual, and peaceful wake up to NPR. Also, I can’t even stop the music once it’s started. I have to go into a separate app to play something else in order to cancel out what is already playing, and then pause what I’ve started in order to get anything to stop. And now, it’s telling me I have to start paying a month fee in order to even continue waking up to my podcasts.... even though I haven’t even been able to, so I don’t know why it’s telling me I only have so many podcast alarms left, despite paying money to even get the app in the first place. Please work out the glitches in this app before you start charging money. I wouldn’t even use this app if it was free.

I kind of hate this app now. It was great during the first week of use because it got me up and I got to listen to my favorite podcasts every day, which really helped me wake back up again and stay awake. BUT it doesn’t synch with the podcast app. After a couple days it’s played all the episodes originally downloaded, but doesn’t download the next episodes and just replays the originals because apparently I have to manually download them. So I went to the podcast app, but Next Up doesn’t tell the podcast app that I’ve already listened to those five episodes, so new ones don’t download. Instead, if I hit play in the podcast app, I end up listening to the same episode I’ve already listened to three times in Next Up. So then I have to listen to the beginning of each episode and see if it sounds familiar, which is difficult because The beginning parts of each episode I was still half asleep for, so sometimes I’m halfway through one before I realize I’ve already heard it a few times. If this app integrated better, I would consider a very useful tool, as is, it’s more frustrating than helpful. Some other bugs that need to be worked out: it tells me I need to download Apple Music in order for it to play, but I’ve already downloaded it. If I’ve closed the app, it won’t play the podcast at the time. If I open up the app before bed to make sure it does my early am alarm, several hours after my afternoon alarm was supposed to play, it’ll start playing the afternoon alarm, which is not what I want to hear at eleven pm when I trying to slow down. But if I open the app a few minutes after the pm alarm was supposed to play, it does nothing. So I have to go to the podcast app to listen to anything. It was nice in the beginning, but at this point it’s more hassle than it’s worth. :/

This app doesn’t download podcasts. Instead it depends on the Apple podcast app. This is fine if you use Apple Podcasts and listen to the podcast set in the alarm at other times. If not you will need to open the Podcasts app periodically to tell it to resume downloading episodes. I listened to the same episode 4 mornings in a row before I realized this was happening. Additionally, even when there are new episodes downloaded and the alarm is activated it will inexplicably not play the episode. If you want to get through the day without multiple charging sessions you’ll have to manually activate the alarm every day. This app chews through battery like crazy otherwise.