Podkicker • Podcast Manager

An alternative to all the bloated podcatchers out there.

★ It's FREE!

★ Plays audio and videocasts.
★ Handles RSS/ATOM feeds.
★ Streams or downloads podcasts.
★ OPML import/export.
★ Google Listen/Reader import.
★ Recommendations based on current subscriptions.
★ Searchable database with over 65.000 podcasts
★ Browse geotagged podcasts on maps.
★ Easy, clean and intuitive UI.


If you dont like it - dont use it, there are other podcatchers available on android market such as Beyond Pod, DoggCatcher, PodTrapper, Listen, Hapi Podcast, etc.

More features is on the way, but dont expect to many of them since this application is meant to be non-bloated.


Constructive feedback is always appreciated.


Permissions asked for and why they are needed:

§ INTERNET

• to access the internets, downloading audio, video etc.

§ ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE

• to check what kind of connection the phone is currently on; 3G, wifi, etc.

§ WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE

• to save mediafiles on the external storage.

§ READ_PHONE_STATE

• to be able to detect when there is an incoming phonecall so that playback can be paused.

§ MANAGE_ACCOUNTS
§ GET_ACCOUNTS
§ USE_CREDENTIALS

• This is used for requesting authtokens from the accountmanager to authenticate with google reader.

The permissions may sound scary but they are actually for security as it makes your accountmanager (after prompting you) do the authentication with google reader so this app never will have to ask for, save or see any passwords you use with that service.

§ WAKE_LOCK

• To prevent phone from going into standby-mode when audio plays








I receive a lot of emails and feedback (mostly very positive!), this IS appreciated and I read all of them so keep sending, but mostly I have no time to respond as it would take hours each day. Also, there is a lot of questions regarding individual podcasts and their content. I'm not personally involved in any podcasts and i'm not making any money on this app - the ad revenue adds up to a few cents per day - so it wouldn't make sense to spend time answering questions like that.


If you are having problems, read this first.

Podkicker is written to handle feeds that stick to the RSS 2.0 or ATOM 1.0 standards. 99.9% of all podcasts is published in the RSS 2.0-format, which is great. Podkicker can parse and interpret this formats IF and only IF they are VALID and wellwritten and follows the specifications. In most cases when a feed is not working, it's because of networking error or the feed deviates from the standards, such as characters not matching the declared charset, incorrect dateformat, incorrect formatted tags and/or attributes in the xml.

Validate your podcasts here: http://validator.w3.org/feed/

If it's a valid feed and still not working, i am happy to correct it immediately, but I just cannot write one new podkicker for every podcast in existense ;)


Dont expect podkicker (or any other app) to run properly if you are using:

Nightly/unstable/broken custom roms
Automatic taskmanagers, taskkillers or batterysavers.


Some podcasts - and especially some videocasts - wont work at all. This is because podkicker only supports mediaformats that is also supported by the android framework, which amounts to a very large number. But for some unknown reason, some podcast stations choose some very obscure mediaformats like quicktime and others which can only be played on iphones.

Read about the supported mediaformats here:

http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html


I'm also not responsible for the content in the HUGE database of podcasts that can be searched from within the application. It may contain podcasts with explicit content in various forms. Because of this, I have rated this application as "medium maturity" on android market.



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podcasts | podcatcher | rss | manager | player | audioplayer | videocast | netcast