I have been using the Stitcher app on the iPhone for about 4 and a half years now. Among other things, Stitcher aggregates multiple podcasts into a single place and lets you subscribe and listen to shows back to back like a radio station. I used the app primarily at work just to have something going on in the background throughout the day.
Over the past several months, Stitcher has been steadily increasing their rate and annoyance of ads. There are, of course, ads in each podcast but switcher will also insert its own ads on top of that. It started off gentle enough with a ad here or there between podcasts that could be skipped. Then, I could no longer skip the pretentious Jaguar ads and had to listen to at least 10 seconds. Even that was acceptable to me but now they have stooped to new lows. Without being touched, when the app’s open then mid podcast, it will automatically launch the Apple App store and take be the page of some crappy game. This happened to me 3 times at work yesterday.
Back in 2010, Stitcher was the best (maybe only) game in town for downloading and listening to podcasts without syncing with a PC. Apple would let you subscribe to podcasts but you had to let them sync to your iPhone from iTunes through a computer. It was not a good process at all. Stitcher, however, let me browse, subscribe, and listen to shows from anywhere and that was fantastic.
Now, Apple had separated Podcasts out from the Music app into its own app. I can do all of the things I did with Stitcher but without any additional ads. It was a no brainier. The only thing I can even think of that I might miss is the news functionality of Stitcher. I never used that though and all it ever did for me was get in the way of my podcasts.
Also, there were some podcasts that were not available on Stitcher, like Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast. Now I have everything I want in a single location and am glad I ditched Stitcher for good.