Pocket Casts vs MAPS.ME

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 The team behind Pocket Casts work hard to maintain a reliable and high quality catalog so you can avoid out of date listings, problems with raw feeds, etc.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.

That saves a lot of download, e.g. from ~500MB in other applications it is reduced to ~50MB for German surroundings.

Users without a data connection can still use the app for turn by turn directions, which is great for those that travel or use a device that does not have a cellular data connection.

MAPS.ME uses data from OpenStreetMap, meaning the data retrieved from that service is a community-based map. Anyone can freely edit and contribute to the map, a map concept that is similar to Wikipedia.

By using compression of the map data, MAPS.ME is able to speed up the rendering of their maps to one's device. This allows for a quicker feeling app.

And showing it color-coded (Google-maps-like) on the streets.

Shows a nicely organize list of interesting places to visit close to your current location.

The design of the app uses a material-like interface making for a close to native looking experience on Android.

Automatically downloads vector maps for offline use.

Click on the map and you will have the option to Bookmark, Route From, Route To. Having selected Bookmark simply offers to edit it, e.g. give it a different name.

It is possible to add new and edit existing POIs in OpenStreetMap database using a nice interface.

There is a night mode option.

Displays information from booking.com about hotels and apartments.