Pocket Casts vs Now for Reddit

You can set a 'start from' position for a podcast to skip a set number of seconds from the beginning of an episode. Great for when you don't want to listen to an intro you've heard a couple of dozen times before.

Additionally, you can also change the playback speed, to slow down fast talkers or speed up slow talkers.

The most pleasing User Experience (UX) to set a Sleep Timer.
Activating the sleep timer will stop the podcast after a set period of time or at the End of the Episode.

Pocket Casts has one of the most colorful, pleasant to use interfaces.

For example, the app takes the most prominent color from the album art and colorizes the rest of the playback interface based on that color. This allows the app to stay vibrant and slightly different for each podcast.

Or the way it displays featured podcasts in a colorful mosaic made from album art, makes the whole experience of using the app pleasant.

You can set Pocket Casts to automatically download the latest episode of a podcast, whenever a new episode is released.

Clicking the plus button in the top-right corner will bring you to featured podcasts. From there you can access multiple ways of finding new things to listen to such as: top charts (that can be separated in audio and video), search (that allows searching both by name and feed URL), a list of podcast networks and different podcast categories.

They also have a great selection of podcasts to choose from. The team behind Pocket Casts work hard to maintain a reliable and high quality catalog so you can avoid out of date listings, problems with raw feeds, etc.

If you use Pocket Casts on more than one device, you can synchronize settings, playback positions, etc., across all your devices.

It is possible to connect Pocket Casts with Sonos, and play podcasts.

Enables you to set a "global" playback speed to use for all podcasts which can be over-ridden by a podcast specific playback speed.

Pocket Casts has a feature called Episode Filter, that allows automatically creating playlists based on setting such as playing states (unplayed, playing, played), status (downloaded, downloading, not downloaded), episode type (audio, video) and of course podcasts themselves.

You can also customize the appearance of the playlist with a color and an icon to help it stand out easier.

You can set custom "skip forward" and "skip backward" timings for easily skipping past parts of podcasts you don't like.

With the card-based UI, the app fits in very well design wise with the Material Design of the OS. Everything is intuitive to use being that the interface is familiar and follows Google's design guidelines.

Now for Reddit utilizes the transparent nav bar implemented in Android 4.4+, making for a cleaner looking interface.

The design of the icon for Now for Reddit is clean, simple and fits well with material design.

Now for Reddit is one of the few Reddit clients that come with the ability to change how much content can be viewed on the screen. You'd also be hard pressed to find another Reddit client that can show you full-size images (via full-size cards) without you having even tapped on the image.

Keep in mind that the configurable card sizes might also have an impact on battery consumption, ranging from tiny cards (most battery efficient) to full size cards (most battery/data hungry).

The design of the app lends itself well to phones and tablets alike no matter the orientation that the device is being held in. Not having to switch apps depending on the users device is a nice feature.

Using Android's profile GPU rendering tool it can be clearly shown how the Now for Reddit is generally more responsive than quite a few of the other popular reddit clients. For people obsessive about the 60 FPS mark, it would be hard to find a near 60 FPS experience as good as Now for Reddit.