Dustin Bluck writing for the Castro blog: State of the App: Year 1

Private and popular feeds update have seen marked improvements, but unpopular feeds were the real issue before and that issue is entirely gone.

I emailed Castro support back in 2021 to ask them for help with my Patreon feeds, which literally never refreshed unless I manually pulled to refresh on each and every feed individually in the app. It sucked and I emailed their support team hoping they would fix it, but nothing happened and not too soon after I had to move onto other apps. It may be a slightly niche issue, but paid podcast feeds aren’t super rare these days, and it really sucks when your podcast apps works well except for the podcasts you pay for and love the most.

Here in 2025 I’ve got an answer how this happened and how the new owners have fixed this issue. Basically, more popular feeds were prioritized for server-side refreshes more often than less popular ones, which makes sense, but that could lead to a hell-state where more popular feeds kept bumping down private and Patreon feeds (which by their very nature have one subscriber each) in the queue to the point they would literally never get to the top and update themselves. The post mentioned this could delay private feeds by a few hours, but I’m here to tell you at least in 2021 it would be multiple days behind to the point of effectively being never updated. This issue being fixed puts Castro back on the board for me as an app I can choose to use again, and I’m really happy the new owners have put in a lot of work to make the basics work again in the app.

Just over a year ago I posted:

Betting on “Castro will actually get better with this new owner” has been a reliable way to go broke in the past, but the vibe feels different to me this time…the new owners seem to get it and I’ve got higher hopes this time 🤞

A year later and I’d say things are indeed back on track with Castro. The core of the app seems to be much improved, it has the Comfort Zone Audience Approved Best Blue Icon award, and I’ve finally adopted it as my podcast app of choice for the first time since 2021. I hope year 2 consists of some more feature updates now that the core is much better. Personally, I’d love to see an enhancement to the clip sharing feature. Overcast make editing these easy with a waveform in the trimming UI, and I’d also really love it if there could be a way to bake captions into the video file, which seems to make these clips more engaging for people scrolling on social media with sound off.

I’ll talk more about this in this week’s Comfort Zone, which I’ll try to remember to add a link here after that episode’s released.