Today we’re introducing Pod Seek, a podcast app for iOS heavily focused on discovery and recommendations. It learns what you like and has become my favorite way to find new podcasts. The recommendations are already very good and getting better. Pod Seek also uses Apple’s foundation models to let you ask questions about podcasts before you commit to subscribing. We’re starting with trailers, and we have a lot more planned. Here’s a sample of the experience:

Of course, it syncs your new subscriptions back to Castro so you can use your familiar workflow once you’re ready to listen. We’ve wrapped all this in a modern liquid glass design that I feel really is best in class. It’s the podcast app for 2026.

Importantly, this is a podcast app. It takes full advantage of podcasting 2.0 to give the richest possible experience one can get from an RSS feed. The discovery features are derived from podcast:trailer. The app also incorporates transcript, funding, and person tags. We want to reimagine what a podcast app can be with these new features while maintaining our long-term commitment to open standards and RSS. We feel the podcasting ecosystem is evolving and the apps in this space need to evolve as well so they aren’t left behind.

Download it here and let us know what you think.

Questions

Why a new app?

It allows us to experiment with new paradigms while not degrading the existing Castro experience or alienating users familiar with it. This didn’t work as a new tab in Castro. It had to be its own thing. But we may be able to take learnings or specific features and apply them to Castro where they make sense.

What does this mean for Castro?

Nothing. Work on Castro continues. We’ve significantly overhauled the client infrastructure this past month to make things easier to iterate on, so you should continue to see major performance improvements along with new product features. We also have an active beta test for Android going on now.

What does it cost?

The app is completely free without any subscription or ads for now.

Is there an Android app?

Not yet but we’ll add one quickly if the project continues to gain interest.