If you take podcast listening seriously, as I do, the podcast catcher and player app you choose is no light decision. Podcast apps are one category where I feel it's worth spending a few dollars to get the right app, rather than use one that's free or comes included with your phone. On iPhone, Pocket Cast ($3.99) is one of the best, right alongside Downcast. Both are Editors' Choice apps for their rich features. Pocket Casts offers syncing across multiple devices, while Downcast is available for iPhone only. They each have a few unique features, and I recommend both highly. They're both among the best iPhone apps.

Podcast Catching

To get started with Pocket Casts, you need to first buy the $3.99 app from the App Store, install it on your iPhone, and load up some of your favorite shows. If you use other instances of Pocket Casts, such as the Pocket Casts Android app or Windows Phone app, you have to pay for those separately. There's also a Pocket Casts Web app for Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer, available for a one-time fee of $9. To sync your listening experience across all these instances of Pocket Casts, you can create an account (or sign into an existing account) in the Settings, but it's not required to set up the iPhone app initially.

I don't mind the $3.99 cost, as the one-time fees for each installation are chump change to the membership fees that are common in the music streaming app world. Spotify, for example, costs $9.99 per month for a premium subscription. Aren't we podcast listeners lucky the podcasting world hasn't moved toward a similar business model and service? If you only need an app for iPhone, however, you can save a buck by choosing Downcast instead. iPhones come with the Apple Podcast app installed (and you can't uninstall it, unfortunately) but its options and features aren't nearly as thorough as those in Pocket Casts and Downcast.

With the Pocket Casts app on your iPhone, you can search for your favorite podcasts, or you can import them via an OPML file (a simple way to transfer all your shows if you're switching over from another app).

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After finding all your favorite shows, you'll probably want to make some custom lists to automatically sort, say, the podcasts you like to listen to while commuting versus those you save for the weekend. You can make custom lists to your heart's desire, name them, and even assign each one an icon. I'm always happy when an app helps me stay organized.

Player and Controls
A rich array of detailed settings and options make Pocket Casts shine. I like that you can customize the skip settings, choosing exactly how many seconds the app will rewind and fast forward when you tap the skip button. My favorite setting, though, is the one that lets you automatically start each episode of any show as many seconds in as you want. For example, if you know that Bullseye with Jesse Thorn always has a minimum of two minutes of introductions and promos, you can automatically set that show to jump ahead 120 seconds. Another setting automatically fast-forwards anytime the app detects a long pause.

As a longtime user of the Downcast app, I've grown accustomed to its interface for playing podcasts, and I have to admit that I fumbled with one or two actions in the interface during the first few days when I initially switched over to Pocket Casts. There's something slightly unintuitive about removing a single episode manually, for example, because Pocket Casts doesn't support gestures for swiping left or right on individual episodes to delete them. Nothing in the design is terrible, but a few things feel slightly unintuitive to me.

The app has an option for automatically deleting episodes once you've played them to help free up space on your phone. A collapsible left menu stores most of the settings and options you need.

When it comes to discovering new shows, Pocket Casts is a little above average. You can browse shows by category, just as you can on iTunes or virtually anywhere else you get podcasts, but you can also look at what's popular nearby. Pocket Casts' discovery tools go a little beyond the basics, but not as far as Acast (available for iPhone and Android), which includes plenty of shows from the U.K. and Sweden, as well as North America. I like the idea of getting podcast recommendations that aren't limited to one country's borders (Acast is a Swedish company), but there are no language filters in Acast to help you eliminate podcasts in tongues you don't speak.

Stitcher also is in the business of recommending new podcast content to you, but it focuses on news and single episodes. It's a neat tool if you tap into podcasts that come from radio news organizations to stay on top of current events. On the flip side, that same feature is annoying if every time you want to listen to a storytelling show, Stitcher is trying to tell you what happened at The White House today.

Great Features, Multi-Device Syncing
Because of its detailed settings and options, including the ability to sync your listening experience across multiple devices, Pocket Casts is an Editors' Choice among podcast catchers and players on iPhone. But it shares that prestige with the $2.99 Downcast app. Both are great apps with a few unique features, and which one you should choose depends on which features are important to you.