Comment by roccozanni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roccozanni | Hacker News Reader

We're thrilled to announce this huge update of our podcast listening application. The app has been rewritten from the ground up to provide the best podcast listening experience on Android, applying Material Design in its purest form, focusing on realtime data syncing and offline listening experience. When we started working on this app 7 months ago, we wanted to learn from all the mistakes we made on the previous versions, leveraging the best possible tools and technologies even if sometimes this meant throwing away previous assumptions, knowledge, and push ourselves out of the comfort zone.

Here some tech details that we'd like to share:

- functional reactive programming http://reactivex.io/

- networking with OkHttp by Square http://square.github.io/okhttp/

- image loading with Glide by Bump Technologies https://github.com/bumptech/glide

- audio streaming playback with Exoplayer by Google https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer

- view injection with Butterknife by Jake Wharton http://jakewharton.github.io/butterknife/

- dependency injection with Dagger2 by Google http://google.github.io/dagger/

A big thanks to @brigitadaisy for the huge effort she made in designing this app, @DrAL3X for helping me on Android development, @pracucci for providing totally new and super fast apis, and to all the @spreaker team for the support in those months of hard work.

| the best podcast listening experience on Android

That's a big claim. Not to discount your work, but why should someone use your app over Pocket Casts (which I believe to currently have the best Android app).

I haven't tried that app, but it would have to be pretty awesome to pry me away from Podcast Addict. The latter isn't the prettiest app on the world, but it gives me a ridiculous amount of control over the listening experience.

I'd like to hear the pitch vs Pocket Casts too, but I think there's definitely room for someone to improve over Pocket Casts. I bought Pocket Casts and ended up never using it. I went back to an old iPhone with Castro, which I really love.

To me it comes down to a few things:

- Spreaker is "streaming first": it's way easier to just play something new that you want to listen to, without going through the Subscribe->my podcasts->download(or stream) flow. You can also download podcasts, but this appears to be a secondary mode of consumption.

- There is great emphasis around curation: there are both curated lists (they somewhat look like the Play Store discovery experience) and channels, which are good when you don't want to pick something specific to listen to but you just want to play something.

All things considered, it's a very different experience from most of the podcasting apps out there that come from the original iTunes-like subscribe experience. It might be better or worse, and this is very personal. But I believe this is moving in a different direction.

just wanted to add a couple of things other than what @the_bask already said:

- live broadcasting and interactivity: our app offer all live broadcasts available on the Spreaker platform. If one of your favorite shows starts a new live stream, you'll be notified in the app, so you can listen to it while it's live and interact with the host using the embedded chat

- we know that it's a big claim, but we put A LOT of effort in this app, working since the day one with a clear goal: offer the best experience; I think nobody works so hard with the goal to create NOT the best experience app :)

We'll be very happy if you can spend some time playing with the app and tell us what you think it can be improved. Every feedback is welcome, especially the negative ones, so we can learn from them and deliver a better app

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