Most people have a short list of apps that they use every day, often multiple times per day. For me, like others, one of those apps is a podcast app. Pretty much everyone today listens to podcasts, and most are using the very popular podcast app called “Pocket Casts” from an Australian developer, Shifty Jelly.
Until now, Pocket Casts was only available on Android, iOS and on the web via your browser.
For most that is fine, but in my case, if I was using the web app I would often accidentally close the tab running my podcast. A very jarring thing to have happen, when you are in the zone getting work done.
//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
Today, however, I discovered that Shifty Jelly, despite saying they had no plans to bring native Windows and macOS apps, has brought a version of Pocket Casts to the Windows App Store.
What I like about this, is that this appears to be a PWA application, which mean it is nothing more than the web app, in a store wrapper or container. PWAs or Progessive Web Apps are the future of apps on both mobile and desktop platforms because it is truly a “write once, deploy everywhere” design when developing the application. Google, Microsoft and Apple (sort of) are supporting the PWA format, which will allow users to experience the same UI, with a few native elements, across all platforms.
If you look at apps like Twitter and Facebook, they use the same UI, but their code bases are entirely different code bases from one platform to another. With a PWA it is easier for a developer to support a larger user base, which means the days of waiting for your Android device to receive the update that iOS users saw a month ago will be gone, hopefully!
//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
Pocket Casts for Windows 10 appears to support most of what is found in the mobile apps, such as downloading episodes, but I have yet to come across any functions allowing for users to automatically download new episodes, auto-clean-up, etc. I hope to see those in a future update, but they are features I can live without on a desktop app environment.
GadgetSyrup 