The New Overcast

Marco Arment, introducing the 10th-anniversary re-write of Overcast:

Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person.

That’s why there haven’t been many new features or changes in years.

You saw it, and I saw it. I wasn’t able to serve my customers as well as I wanted.

For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency.

Now, development is rapidly accelerating. I’m more responsive, iterating more quickly, and ultimately making the app much better.

Promotions for podcasts will often end with a call to action along the lines of “Available wherever you get your podcasts.” As Anil Dash noted a few months ago, that’s a radical statement. Using whatever client software you want to access content published using open standards on the internet is the way the internet was designed to be. But it’s not the way it’s worked out, by and large. Streaming video is largely available only via proprietary apps from each individual service. Same with streaming music.

But not so with podcasts. Podcasts, more than any other medium, exemplify the original spirit of the open internet. “Wherever you get your podcasts”, for me, has meant Overcast for the last decade. And I feel confident that will be true for the next decade. I’ve got a few small gripes with this major update, but overall it’s clear that Overcast is better than ever.

★ Monday, 22 July 2024