Marco Arment released Overcast yesterday. It’s a great addition to the widening selection of iOS podcast apps.

While third party podcast apps are ostensibly competing with each other, we share a common goal of convincing customers to use one in the first place. This is going to become even more important when Apple releases iOS 8 with its Podcasts app preinstalled.

By making Overcast free with in app purchase, Marco has lowered the barrier to trying a third party app. From our perspective, a user trying any third party app is good for all third party apps. If a user is persuaded to download one alternative they should be more likely to consider others in the future, especially given the variety of apps that are available. Marco referred to this diversity in his Macstories interview:

With a podcast app […] there are tons of big and small design and priority decisions that each developer makes along the way. These decisions add up to radically different apps — I can’t point to any two podcast apps in the store today that are very similar to each other in actual use.

I encourage you to try Overcast. In fact, if you really love podcasts, I encourage you to try all the others too. If you spend hours listening to podcasts every week, it’s going to be worth your while to find the app that suits you best.

• Overcast by Marco Arment
• Downcast by Seth McFarland at Jamawkinaw
• Pocket Casts by Russell Ivanovic and co at Shifty Jelly
• Instacast by Martin Hering at Vemedio
• Pod Wrangler by David Smith
• Network by Andrew Conlan
• And of course, our very own Castro