Pocket Casts vs Nova Launcher Prime

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 The team behind Pocket Casts work hard to maintain a reliable and high quality catalog so you can avoid out of date listings, problems with raw feeds, etc.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

Nova Launcher provides an experience that's similar to stock Android, but adds multiple customization options. Customization ranges in ways that interactions and the user interface can be changed both aesthetically and functionally.

Speed of Nova Launcher is one of the app's key points. Even with a lot of widgets Nova Launcher performs speedy.

Options include horizontal pages, vertical scrolling or list. The user is also able to adjust the background transparency. This way the users drawer can look unique while also offering more or less apps on the page depending on their preference.

From the Nova Settings menu, users can create a custom grid size for their desktop and app drawer, up to a maximum of 12 columns and rows. Discriminating users can also adjust the size of the margins on the top, bottom, left and right. This allows for users to set how many widgets and apps can fit on these screens.

Not all custom launchers allow custom icon packs. Nova supports most custom icon packs that are in the Play Store.

Turning on infinite scrolling allows the user to move seamlessly among all of their home screens, rather than having to scroll backward when the last page is reached. This proves particularly useful if the user has a large number of homescreens. Infinite scrolling can also be enabled in the app drawer.

There are extra bottom row dock pages accessible when swiping left or right on the dock. In Nova's settings there is support for a maximum of five dock pages and a minimum of one.

This way you can set up to 25 shortcuts in the dock that can be scrolled though, leaving plenty of room on the home screen for widgets and other apps.

Nova has the ability to add an assortment of action shortcuts to the home-screen which can be performed when swiping on particular areas or icons (as opposed to when tapping).

Nova Launcher has the ability to add folders into the app drawer making for easy sorting of many apps.

The user can sort their folders in the drawer and home-screen alphabetically.

The app drawer and widgets take full advantage of a tablets extra screen real estate.

With the custom grids, most widgets can be sized to specifications which give added control over Android home screens.

Within Nova's setting the user can set the notification bar to stay hidden, allowing for more screen real estate.

It has an option to lock the icons and widgets in place as well as locks out the ability to delete apps, preventing accidental rearranging or deletions.

1. Create a folder in the drawer.
2. Drag the folder from the drawer to a home screen.
3. Add more items to the drawer folder.
4. The item gets added automatically to the home screen folder (because it is the same folder).

In addition, the user can set a custom icon for the folder (or for each shortcut).

Use gestures (swipe up, double tap, etc.) to easily launch apps.

Solid performance for getting work (and play) done, no crashes, no slow downs.

Allows you to customize scroll effects, scroll speeds, animation speed, app animations, gestures.

All of these options allow for very individualistic differences in how the launcher performs and looks, making for a great way to set ones phone apart from others.

A free version, Nova Launcher is available, but it lacks gestures, unread counts, custom drawer groups, ability to hide apps from the app drawer, icon swipes and additional scroll effects.

Users can save their configuration in a backup file and quickly restore it.

Nova Launcher Prime offers unread counts for all supported apps, a feature not available on all launchers. Although it requires the free installation of TeslaUnread.

What TeslaUnread does is add unread count numbers to certain application icons in ones application drawer and home screen, giving a quick overview of how many unread notifications they have in that supported application.