Apple releases Podcasts app for iOS

Very interesting….. Apple releases Podcasts app for iOS

Podcasts app is the easiest way to discover, subscribe to and play your favorite podcasts on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Explore hundreds of thousands of free audio and video podcasts from the Podcasts Catalog, and play the most popular podcasts, organized for you by topic, with the all-new Top Stations feature.

So this would explain the lack of podcasts in the iOS 6 betas. Thing is don’t want a ton of different apps for different things taking up space on my home screen, I want one app, say “Music” that handles all music, podcasts, and audiobook functions.

Stupid Apple.

Update: Ok I take it back a little. It’s got some nice features (yes yes, available in other apps such as Instacast and in every single one of the 8,434 podcast clients for Android):

• You can properly subscribe to new podcasts from the app
• Has both skip back and skip forward (podcasters aren’t going to like this much)
• Automatically imports your current podcasts, has an unplayed
• Looks like it has a super-sexy (though oddly Skeuomorphic design that’s bound to attract both praise and critique
• Doesn’t look like there’s a “update all” yet. Come on, if there’s one feature to add it’s this one. Ok, it looks like if you go into the settings for a podcast there’s a ‘subscription’ toggle and an ‘auto-download’ toggle, which (I assume), will check for and download updates when they’re available, though it appears (at least after having run the app and not connecting to iTunes yet) that you have to set the subscription, episodes to keep, and auto-download settings for each podcast. I assume that when connecting to iTunes it’ll pull these settings from it (I hope anyway). IE: “Just works”.
• A few questions still remain though. How will this affect playing from the music app? Will it automatically interact “properly” with iTunes, etc.