Podcast listeners are traditionally creatures of habit when it comes to the app of choice to access all their favorite shows. Thus, whenever a new gateway to podcasts comes along, it often cops the ‘not as good as Overcast’ treatment and is passed into oblivion.
The guys and girls at Breaker, a fresh podcast app available on your iPhone, look poised to buck that trend by trying something novel in the rubric: marry a solid podcast app to a social network, enabling the community of listeners to discuss, recommend and share the content.
For its unique proposition and comprehensive podcasting features, Breaker really comes out of the woodwork offering an app capable of spicing up your day to day podcast game. Basically, think of it as Apple Music’s social component applied to the podcast world and you will get the general gist.
Since we are effectively looking at merger of two strands, let’s briefly untangle them separately to demonstrate how each one stacks up.
Podcasting on Breaker
At its core, Breaker delivers a rock solid foundation for playing all your podcasts. When opened for the first time, importing your existing subscriptions from rivalling apps is a cakewalk, and that’s not only pertaining to Apple’s Podcasts app but also the likes of Overcast, Castro and Pocket Casts.
There’s a Discover tab featuring recommendations based on the shows you are currently following, a search bar for finding new material and, most importantly, the podcast player itself leaves little to be desired. To give you a taste, you can for example bookmark shows, speed up the broadcast or download the episode for postponed offline listening. These and more features are all nicely baked into the player, making for a smooth and intuitive listening experience.
Socializing on Breaker
On first launch, Breaker acts reminiscent of most social networks today and recommends a plethora of interesting users for you to follow. Whether they are podcast hosts or regular users, you are provided the platform to stay in touch with them, see what they’ve been up to, check the shows listened to and so forth. Conversely, it is of course possible for you to rake in your own followers as well.
Outside of that you can like, share and discuss any show on Breaker with fellow listeners or discover what’s hot, based on the noise (hearts and comments) an episode makes in the community.
With the basics outlined, we will leave it to you if or if not you want to dive deeper into Breaker’s depths. It’s certainly well thought out and looks the part. Abstractly speaking, if you ever felt inclined to add a layer of community or interaction to your daily podcasts experience, Breaker could be the answer to your questions.
If this has made you curious, go ahead and download Breaker for free on the App Store today!