Non-game Android Apps Recommendations Catch-All

On Windows I just ran the installer, was there something specific giving you trouble?

Looks like Pocket Casts is adding a web player to their sync functionality. But it looks like, to use the service they want $9 after an initial trial (I got a beta invite).

That seems like a bit much when the Android app has already cost me $4.

MannishBoy wrote:

Looks like Pocket Casts is adding a web player to their sync functionality. But it looks like, to use the service they want $9 after an initial trial (I got a beta invite).

That seems like a bit much when the Android app has already cost me $4.

Has anyone tried to run Pocket Casts in Chrome yet? That might be good enough. I am not too keen on the idea of paying $9 for this functionality.

EDIT: To answer my own question, it seems to work just fine!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/JQyJoDt.png)

It's off topic, and I am sorry, but as someone that writes software, decision making like this just makes no sense to me.

Kurrelgyre wrote:

It's off topic, and I am sorry, but as someone that writes software, decision making like this just makes no sense to me.

Which? That I'm concerned about it costing more than 2x the cost for the original software?

I'd probably not use it. I generally have the phone with me, plus, I never play at normal speed, and I'm not sure if it would allow me to play back at higher speeds. So $9 on top of the $4 seems a lot for something I might rarely use. I might pay something for it, but not $9.

I can understand that this probably has a significant infrastructure cost and might truly cost them that much (including a reasonable profit), but I'm probably not going to pay it, and I wonder how many will. So if it truly cost this much to support for them, was it a good business direction?

I have no idea outside of my own needs.

Coming from the iOS ecosystem pretty much the only thing I miss is being able to sync my podcasts between my iTouch and my PC. If I can replicate that for free with my Android device, I'm happy.

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't read through this whole thread, so if the question's been answered before, then sorry about that.

I'm finally getting into listening to podcasts more regularly on my drive to work (usually I do audiobooks). Over the past week, I've been using Beyondpod to do it, on the free version. Now I'm trying to decide which one to shell out actual dollars for, and it'll be either Beyondpod or Pocket Casts.

I'm not a crazy power user or anything, and I don't have a ton of podcasts I listen to, so hopefully this is basic functionality. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Pocket Casts has a free version to try, so I dunno. What I really want is for me to be able to tell each feed "download the next X episodes, after I finish listening, delete it." I know that Beyondpod will let me set that up (I think). Does Pocket Casts have the same functionality?

Chaz wrote:

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't read through this whole thread, so if the question's been answered before, then sorry about that.

I'm finally getting into listening to podcasts more regularly on my drive to work (usually I do audiobooks). Over the past week, I've been using Beyondpod to do it, on the free version. Now I'm trying to decide which one to shell out actual dollars for, and it'll be either Beyondpod or Pocket Casts.

I'm not a crazy power user or anything, and I don't have a ton of podcasts I listen to, so hopefully this is basic functionality. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Pocket Casts has a free version to try, so I dunno. What I really want is for me to be able to tell each feed "download the next X episodes, after I finish listening, delete it." I know that Beyondpod will let me set that up (I think). Does Pocket Casts have the same functionality?

Heh, don't even have to leave this page. Podcasts are probably the most talked about app in this thread.

Pocket Cast seems the favorite here over Beyond Pod and Doggcatcher. However, there are fans of those, too.

Pocket Casts will allow you to download podcasts automatically, and then delete them automatically on completetion of playback.

I swear I hadn't had my coffee yet.

Okay, so I got Pocket Casts. Is there a way to set it to keep only the oldest unplayed episodes? This is mostly for episodic stuff like Nightvale or We're Alive. I can mark everything unplayed, but it looks like the app only wants to let me specify "keep X newest" or "keep all." It seems like if I want auto-downloads to happen, it might just try and download everything, which won't work. Is there a "keep X episodes" that will let me pull them down in sequential order automatically, or is that one of those functionality things that's too specific to really be provided?

Chaz wrote:

I swear I hadn't had my coffee yet.

Okay, so I got Pocket Casts. Is there a way to set it to keep only the oldest unplayed episodes? This is mostly for episodic stuff like Nightvale or We're Alive. I can mark everything unplayed, but it looks like the app only wants to let me specify "keep X newest" or "keep all." It seems like if I want auto-downloads to happen, it might just try and download everything, which won't work. Is there a "keep X episodes" that will let me pull them down in sequential order automatically, or is that one of those functionality things that's too specific to really be provided?

Only the oldest unplayed kept? So delete the newer stuff, even if unplayed?

I don't think so.

It does have a setting to auto download the latest episode, but when you add a new podcast, you might want to go back and manually queue up older stuff to download. Once you do that initially, all new stuff will download automatically, and it will keep however many you tell it to, but I think only the latest or all. If you play an episode, there's a setting to allow you to auto-delete.

You can also do some downloading stuff with custom playlists IIRC, but I don't use those for downloads myself.

Yeah, I think my use case is probably not what they're designing for, unfortunately. I'm probably going to have to make do with downloading a bunch of episodes manually, having it delete as I finish them, then queue up a bunch more. Podcast apps were not made to think of things as episodes, I guess.

This will probably all work better once I get all caught up on things.

Chaz wrote:

Yeah, I think my use case is probably not what they're designing for, unfortunately. I'm probably going to have to make do with downloading a bunch of episodes manually, having it delete as I finish them, then queue up a bunch more. Podcast apps were not made to think of things as episodes, I guess.

This will probably all work better once I get all caught up on things.

Why would you have to queue up more after listening to some? New stuff you can set to autodownload. And if you just go ahead and download the back catalog and set it to "keep all" for that podcast, you'll just gradually work through the episodes and have them deleted as you go.

The only thing I use the "keep latest 2 episodes" type of setup for is a podcast or two that I only rarely listen to. Everything else is set to keep all, but autodelete when played. When I get behind, I just build up a backlog.

For instance, I go in spurts on My Brother, My Brother, and Me. So right now, I am catching back up, but I think I might have close to 20 episodes on the phone. As I play them, the played episodes delete, so that backlog whittles down.

It's a space thing. I want to re-listen to We're Alive, which is a radio drama, so I need to listen from the beginning, in order. By default, the options seem to be either just pulling down the most recent episodes (so just the end of the story, essentially), or everything, which is about 4gb of files.

What I want is for it to auto-download episodes 1-5. If I listen to episodes 1 and 2 today, I want it to delete those as I finish them, then auto-download episodes 6 and 7 overnight. Since it doesn't look like the player can handle doing that, I'll just be trying to remember to manually download the next few episodes every day or so.

Really, it's that I don't necessarily want to have to download the entire series in one massive chunk. This is because I'm listening to stuff that works differently than most podcasts.

Chaz wrote:

It's a space thing. I want to re-listen to We're Alive, which is a radio drama, so I need to listen from the beginning, in order. By default, the options seem to be either just pulling down the most recent episodes (so just the end of the story, essentially), or everything, which is about 4gb of files.

What I want is for it to auto-download episodes 1-5. If I listen to episodes 1 and 2 today, I want it to delete those as I finish them, then auto-download episodes 6 and 7 overnight. Since it doesn't look like the player can handle doing that, I'll just be trying to remember to manually download the next few episodes every day or so.

Really, it's that I don't necessarily want to have to download the entire series in one massive chunk. This is because I'm listening to stuff that works differently than most podcasts.

Ah, I see. I think you're going to have to manually help things along with any podcast app I've tried. But at most, it will be periodically queueing up a few downloads. The deletes would happen automatically.

I've got a 64GB card in my phone, though, so I would just download the whole thing.

You could email the devs, they've been responsive to some of my bug reports and requests. But if I was them, your situation is an edge case, so I might not prioritize it very much.

EDIT: I think what you could do is to make a custom playlist of the whole run of episodes (downloaded or not). If you hit a spot where you catch up to the downloads, it would stream episodes. It would be nice if things would autodownload, but I don't think it does.

Chaz wrote:

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't read through this whole thread, so if the question's been answered before, then sorry about that.

I'm finally getting into listening to podcasts more regularly on my drive to work (usually I do audiobooks). Over the past week, I've been using Beyondpod to do it, on the free version. Now I'm trying to decide which one to shell out actual dollars for, and it'll be either Beyondpod or Pocket Casts.

I'm not a crazy power user or anything, and I don't have a ton of podcasts I listen to, so hopefully this is basic functionality. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Pocket Casts has a free version to try, so I dunno. What I really want is for me to be able to tell each feed "download the next X episodes, after I finish listening, delete it." I know that Beyondpod will let me set that up (I think). Does Pocket Casts have the same functionality?

I'm a little late here, but just wanted to point out that the play store will let you return an app within 2 hours of buying it. It's helped me feel better about trying an app that doesn't offer a free version.

I've been having weird SMS problems with my phone for awhile. Think it started with Sprint's tie in to Google Voice and a bug there with MMS and some off network texts. So I'm going to reload my phone and upgrade the stock ROM to a more recent one (on a pretty old one due to laziness).

My issue is my Google Authenticator App. I think Google accounts should be easy enough to deal with on their site, but I'm not sure about my MS account and another website that I'm using through the authenticator. My question is, if I back up the app with Titanium Backup, then restore it to the updated ROM, will it work without me having to reset everything, or should I just disable 2 factor on those accounts until I've upgraded?

Anybody got any experience with this?

MannishBoy wrote:

My issue is my Google Authenticator App. I think Google accounts should be easy enough to deal with on their site, but I'm not sure about my MS account and another website that I'm using through the authenticator. My question is, if I back up the app with Titanium Backup, then restore it to the updated ROM, will it work without me having to reset everything, or should I just disable 2 factor on those accounts until I've upgraded?

Anybody got any experience with this?

The last time I tried to back up and restore Google Authenticator (using Helium rather than Titanium Backup) it didn't work for me; the same thing happened with some banking apps, so I'm guessing there's some secure data storage that's not included as part of those backups.

For Google at least, I used backup codes to get back in to my account, and then registered my phone again afterwards -- that was pretty straightforward, as long as you have a current set of backup codes handy.

pneuman wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

My issue is my Google Authenticator App. I think Google accounts should be easy enough to deal with on their site, but I'm not sure about my MS account and another website that I'm using through the authenticator. My question is, if I back up the app with Titanium Backup, then restore it to the updated ROM, will it work without me having to reset everything, or should I just disable 2 factor on those accounts until I've upgraded?

Anybody got any experience with this?

The last time I tried to back up and restore Google Authenticator (using Helium rather than Titanium Backup) it didn't work for me; the same thing happened with some banking apps, so I'm guessing there's some secure data storage that's not included as part of those backups.

For Google at least, I used backup codes to get back in to my account, and then registered my phone again afterwards -- that was pretty straightforward, as long as you have a current set of backup codes handy.

Google has a way to recover it from a trusted PC I think. I've been able to find less info on MS, but I know I can print out codes. The website host? Don't know.

MannishBoy wrote:
Chaz wrote:

It's a space thing. I want to re-listen to We're Alive, which is a radio drama, so I need to listen from the beginning, in order. By default, the options seem to be either just pulling down the most recent episodes (so just the end of the story, essentially), or everything, which is about 4gb of files.

What I want is for it to auto-download episodes 1-5. If I listen to episodes 1 and 2 today, I want it to delete those as I finish them, then auto-download episodes 6 and 7 overnight. Since it doesn't look like the player can handle doing that, I'll just be trying to remember to manually download the next few episodes every day or so.

Really, it's that I don't necessarily want to have to download the entire series in one massive chunk. This is because I'm listening to stuff that works differently than most podcasts.

Ah, I see. I think you're going to have to manually help things along with any podcast app I've tried. But at most, it will be periodically queueing up a few downloads. The deletes would happen automatically.

I've got a 64GB card in my phone, though, so I would just download the whole thing.

You could email the devs, they've been responsive to some of my bug reports and requests. But if I was them, your situation is an edge case, so I might not prioritize it very much.

EDIT: I think what you could do is to make a custom playlist of the whole run of episodes (downloaded or not). If you hit a spot where you catch up to the downloads, it would stream episodes. It would be nice if things would autodownload, but I don't think it does.

I've requested this since the previous version of Pocket Casts. They say eventually. They just aren't interested in supporting that feature. So whatever, don't waste your money on it.

BeyondPod recently redesigned and is looking much better. Feeds can be configured on an individual basis without any hassle. I have a few dozen news, current events, whatever, feeds that download the newest 1-3 episodes, depending on the feed and how interested I am in non-current episodes, and another few dozen fiction, history, science, whatever feeds that are downloading the oldest X episodes and as I listen to them, downloads the next episode in sequential order. Just get BeyondPod.

For keeping the oldest N unlistened episodes on hand, I've only found iTunes syncing to do it. We're Alive has made each season an audiobook, though, so that may be preferable for relistening.

At some point ES File Explorer added a nice little feature. When you uninstall an app, it will pop up and ask you if you want to delete any folders and files left behind.

These are what would retain your settings and whatnot if you reinstall an app, but I much appreciate having the option instead of having to go through and manually clean leftover crap.

General Crespin wrote:

At some point ES File Explorer added a nice little feature. When you uninstall an app, it will pop up and ask you if you want to delete any folders and files left behind.

These are what would retain your settings and whatnot if you reinstall an app, but I much appreciate having the option instead of having to go through and manually clean leftover crap.

How does one enable this option? I didn't see it in the settings.

Mostly recently it popped up when I uninstalled Twitter. I know I've seen it before but I can't remember which apps. My guess is not all apps leave this "garbage" behind.

From MS of all places. Nice thing is it still allows you to lock your phone and use a bunch of this stuff.

Anyone have an extra google inbox invite available? I'd like to try out the next version of Gmail. I emailed them, but I have zero patience :).

cheesycrouton wrote:
General Crespin wrote:

At some point ES File Explorer added a nice little feature. When you uninstall an app, it will pop up and ask you if you want to delete any folders and files left behind.

These are what would retain your settings and whatnot if you reinstall an app, but I much appreciate having the option instead of having to go through and manually clean leftover crap.

How does one enable this option? I didn't see it in the settings.

I'm almost positive that it is auto-enabled.

MannishBoy wrote:

From MS of all places. Nice thing is it still allows you to lock your phone and use a bunch of this stuff.

WidgetLocker by TeslaCoil, makers of the awesome Nova launcher is a similar product. Very configurable.

SpyNavy wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

From MS of all places. Nice thing is it still allows you to lock your phone and use a bunch of this stuff.

WidgetLocker by TeslaCoil, makers of the awesome Nova launcher is a similar product. Very configurable.

I'm trying this MS locker, and it's pretty nice. Especially for free. Only complaint I have right now is that you don't see the media controls on the main screen, you have to pull down to get to them (on the screen with the unlock code/pattern).

I'll check it out. I typically turn my lockscreen off, because I just want to get to business.

SpyNavy wrote:

Anyone have an extra google inbox invite available? I'd like to try out the next version of Gmail. I emailed them, but I have zero patience :).

Same here. If you guys have a spare invite, please hook a brother up at gorilla800lbs at gmail dawt com.