[SimplePod] A New Podcast App

Introduction

Ever since I started developing with flutter a year or two ago, one of the things that I’ve always want to make was a Podcast App.

Currently I use Podcast Addict as my player of choice, and while it’s often regarded as the best Podcast App on Android, there are a couple huge flaws that hinders its use for a lot of people: lack of syncing and lack more than 1 non-auto playlist (Edit: Apparently you can have more than one playlists, but you only can add podcasts, not individual episodes to the list) . And while I love Podcast Addict, there’s always a few things I’ve wanted to change, such as:

• Not Showing both the current chapter (when applicable) and the podcast’s name and publish date

• I wish the chapters page was more integrated with the UI, instead of being a button that goes to another screen

• If you open the player from the widget or the notification player and press the OS’s back button it would quit the app instead of going the list of podcasts

• I don’t like the process of ordering the podcast in your own order

• I think the app relies a bit too much on the main app drawer

• The ‘more’ (vertical triple dot) button has too many items (some with sub items) for one popup menu

• etc.

  These are mostly minor problems, and I do think that this is still by far the best podcast app on Android right now, but I can (barely) code apps, and I’m not doing anything major right now, so why not try it out myself?

Foreseeable Challenges

• Chapters

  • Chapters have gained popularity among a lot of podcast, and it really adds to the podcast, however there is one major flaw with how they currently work: They are embedded in frames in the mp3 / m4a files, not the RSS feed. If I was working in Java, then this would be relatively trivial as there’s libraries that can extract the frames for me, however the same is not true for Dart; the only library that I found that could get frames from the file, would crash for bigger files, which most podcasts are. If anyone knows of a good library that can do this in Dart, please tell me below.

• Syncing and Storage in General

  • I’m not sure how I plan to store the subscriptions, listening times, settings, etc. yet

User Interface

One of the reasons I love Podcast Addict is the general UI, so my app has a lot of parallels when it comes to the UI. While I have lightly touched on parsing the RSS feeds, most of the time I’ve spent so far has been on the UI.

I was about to make a quick change (adding a queue tab) before showing off the screenshots, but I noticed a bug where if there was over 3 items in the bottom navigation bar, then it would ignore the background color and become white. I noticed that I was quite a few flutter versions behind, so I decided to use Android Studio’s update, which also updated the program itself. Slight problem, the dart and flutter plugins aren’t currently compatible with the latest Android Studio version… welp, so:

Here’s Some Screenshots:

• Main UI + Player: https://ibb.co/album/kVBegF

• Settings: https://ibb.co/album/fXQuFa

What’s Next

Once the Flutter and Dart plugins for Android Studio work again, I’ll continue to work on the UI. After I think I’m “done“ with it, I’ll move to how to store the settings, and then a data model that would work to store podcasts feeds with the bells and whistles added by the app.