I like Marco Arment and I admire his convictions, but I've avoided Overcast on principle because of a) his initial willingness to burn cash in order to gain as many users as possible (at the expense of third-party apps like Castro), and b) the app's gratuitous subscription model. I hope he keeps up the good work, but I also really hope that PocketCasts continues to be a worthy opponent.

What's the principle involved here? Not liking something being a business?

I'm uncomfortable with the fact that Marco would frequently proclaim his support for indie development, but was also willing to outright lose money in order to undercut his competition and dominate the podcast market. (In his own words.) Yes, if you have a lot of money, you can acquire tons of customers by releasing your app for free and using a half-hearted "patronage" model. Most developers don't have that option. It might make good business sense, but doing it while saying you care about the indie scene strikes me as hypocritical. (I concede that this is perhaps a petty and uncharitable interpretation of events, but it really miffed me when it was happening.)

As for subscriptions, I simply hate that business model with a passion and will do almost anything to avoid it.

The question with Overcast, is whether it will be able to compete in the open market with Marco's almost quixotic desire to avoid any form of tracking whatsoever. He won't even track stop/start/listen actions, and now he's eliminating tracking pixels (https://marco.org/2018/04/27/overcast42) - all very admirable, but by foregoing all the obvious revenue opportunities, will he be able to make it up by attracting a large enough audience who will purchase/subscribe to his app so that he can continue to develop it? Is privacy an important enough attribute for the podcast listening audience?

This is the weirdest critique of an app I've ever read on HN. Overcast isn't tracking users enough?

He also runs ads in Overcast, so he’s not relying on subscriptions alone.

And a popular podcast that makes him $5500/week in sponsorship revenue (x3 ads per show but /3 hosts).

Seconding Overcast - it has traditionally traded blows with Pocket Casts as the best 3rd party podcast app on iOS, but I like it better for the smart speed and voice boosting features.

Overcast is continuing to go against the podcast industry grain by making privacy a distinguishing feature (https://marco.org/2018/04/27/overcast42). Good move. It's not useful to me as I have Android as well as iOS devices, but if I was Apple-locked, I'd be having a serious look at Overcast.

I agree overcast is miles ahead of pocketcasts.It protects privacy of the users, smart speed is awesome (removing silences and thus saving tons of time) and app is not laggy as pocketcasts was

Volume boost is part of pocketcasts as well