Credit: Joe Fedewa / How-To GeekI always find that Android Auto is at its best when you keep it as stripped back as possible. It’s great for navigation and music, but throw a podcast app into the mix, and it can quickly start to complicate things again. You don’t want to be browsing through hundreds of episodes or fiddling with complicated menus while driving.
Pocket Casts is the podcast app that gets the balance right. It’s got a powerful phone app that you can use for organizing and queuing up your podcasts, but the Android Auto interface is focused purely on the essentials. In my experience, it’s comfortably the best podcast app for Android Auto.
Pocket Casts does the organizing before you get in the car
Android Auto isn’t the place for a complicated podcast app
Pocket Casts maintains a clear distinction between Android Auto and phone, or between driving and not driving, that isn’t replicated in other podcast apps like Spotify.
The phone is where Pocket Casts really shines. The discovery features are excellent. You get top charts, curated lists, and assorted recommendations alongside the regular search function. This alone helped to make it my podcast app of choice some time ago.
But what makes it especially useful for the car is its playlist features. It goes way beyond the normal Up Next queue, although you get that as well if you want to do it manually.
What Pocket Casts offers is the Smart Playlist function that automatically updates with podcast episodes based on various criteria that you set. You can choose which podcasts you want to add them from, and narrow down the choices based on things like when the episodes were released, how long they are, and so on. It stops you from having to search through all your subscriptions to find things to listen to.
As well as a dog-walking smart playlist that queues up the latest shorter episodes from my podcasts, I’ve got a “long drive” one that finds longer episodes. I queue it up when I get in the car, and I won’t have to touch it again.
Its Android Auto UI gets out of the way
Simplicity is the key
In the car, Pocket Casts becomes much simpler and is one of the best Android Auto apps. It isn’t designed for browsing huge libraries, and that’s a good thing. The features are still there if you really need them — you can discover new podcasts, for example — but that isn’t the intended use. Pocket Casts notes that the Android Auto interface uses the standard Google UI templates, with a focus on simple navigation and a distraction-free experience.
The buttons are big and obvious, and highly visible in case you ever need to press them. But this simplicity doesn’t come at the expense of functionality. Smaller but no less important things like playback speed controls are still accessible, you just don’t have to scroll your way through a huge app to find them.
Other podcast apps that I’ve tested on Android Auto, like AntennaPod or Podcast Republic, often either lack the optimization you need when driving, or are stripped back but have a more limited Up Next feature that takes a lot more work to get sorted. For me, Pocket Casts’ Smart Playlists make the app feel more like a personal radio station, serving up content for as long as I need it.
Pocket Casts finds the right balance. It’s very powerful and capable when you use it on the phone, but you interact with it as little as possible when driving.
It stays in sync with your other devices
Pick up exactly where you left off
The other thing I like about Pocket Casts that’s relevant when you’re on the go is how seamlessly it moves between devices. It syncs your podcast list, playback status, and position within individual episodes so that it’s accessible wherever you’re listening (and the app works on pretty much any device or platform).
So, I can start listening on my phone, continue in the car, and then pick up again later on a desktop without missing a word. It means that Android Auto doesn’t feel like a separate part of my podcast setup. It’s something more akin to a streaming app like Spotify than an app that’s based around local files.
Pocket Casts handles the Android Auto compromise well
Finding the right balance in an Android Auto app must be quite difficult. You want it to be as simple and distraction-free as possible, but it still needs to be useful.
Pocket Casts manages this by making intelligent choices about what you should do on your phone and what you should do on the big screen. Its automation means you can prepare everything in advance, then cut back on how much you ever have to touch the app while you’re driving. But your listening remains completely seamless. That’s what makes it Android Auto’s best podcast app for me.
