Arment justifies this move by saying that dynamic ad insertion used by major podcasts breaks streaming playback. Plus, with today’s network speeds, downloading episodes before playing is a more reliable method for podcast consumption.

Image Credits: Overcast

Besides this change, Arment spent almost 18 months rebuilding the app with modern frameworks and programming languages.

The core of the app remains the same, with functions like smart speed for silence skipping and voice boost. But there are some missing features at launch, such as Siri Shortcuts support, storage management and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) support for exporting and importing podcast subscriptions — those are coming soon.

“Most of Overcast’s code was ten years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person,” he said in an in-app writeup.

“For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade.”

Image Credits: Overcast

Arment’s note said that the app is faster and has easily reachable controls for large phones. Other features include an undo button if you accidentally jumped to a different part of the podcast and setting playlist priorities.