Useful Ubuntu Touch Apps – PodCat

A podcast is a form of digital media consisting of an episodic program downloaded or streamed over the Internet using an XML protocol called RSS. Podcast episodes can be audio radio, video files, PDFs, or ePub files. These episodes can be viewed and listened to on a number of different devices including computers, portable media players, and smartphones.

The publisher or broadcaster podcasts the program by offering the episodes and the XML document to a web server. Whilst large media corporations are prominent publishers of podcasts, almost anyone can publish them, as often or as infrequent as they wish. Podcasts are a great way of keeping up to date with the latest news, reviews, banter, gossip, to deepen your understanding of the world we live in, and much more.

Podcasting lets listeners automatically receive the latest episodes of their chosen programmes as soon as they are released. This operation is made very simple by using the appropriate client software. The consumer can subscribe to the podcast and automatically check for and download new episodes, or download episodes of a podcast series individually.

PodCat is a podcast player for Ubuntu Touch that’s forked from Podbird. It’s free and open source software.

Here’s a few images of PodCat in action.

Features include:

• Follows Ubuntu Touch guidelines for the user interface.
• Subscribe to podcasts with decent search functionality.
• Display podcasts in a grid or list view.
• Configurable playback settings – define the skip forward and skip back periods.
• Option to continue listening to a podcast where you stopped.
• Various settings for podcast episodes such as the refresh time period, automatically download new episodes, option to only download episodes over WiFi.

Website: gitlab.com/cibersheep/podcat
Developer: Joan CiberSheep
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

PodCat was evaluated on the Volla Phone Quintus, a smartphone powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 7050 with 8 cores, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, running Ubuntu Touch 24.04.

Eligibility criteria

For an Ubuntu Touch app to be awarded our love, it must satisfy the following criteria:
	High quality with a good set of features, stable in operation;
	No charge to use the app;
	No intrusive ads in the program;
	Open source and proprietary software can be included;