Castro

After all the talk of Castro in the last twenty-four hours since its release, and as an avid podcast listener myself, I couldn’t help but feel obligated to weigh in. With articles from John Moltz, Cody Fink, and Shawn Blanc waiting unread in my Instapaper queue, I downloaded Castro earlier this evening expecting to burn the midnight oil to get this article out. It came as a great surprise, then, when I tried every one of Castro’s features and saw every screen within about fifteen minutes.

Obviously designed with iOS 7 in mind, Castro came to market without any carryovers from past versions unlike the industry’s current darlings Instacast and Pocketcasts, and it shows in an aesthetically pleasing user interface. In addition to an attractive departure from the norm with respect to its design though, Castro’s youth also appears to have manifested itself in the app’s unfortunately small feature set. However, whether this limited functionality came as a result of time constraints or an overbearing philosophy dictating extreme simplicity, I cannot say for sure. Outside the apparently remarkable ability to download episodes in the background, the much more venerable ability to quickly search for and find podcasts, and the obviously praiseworthy design though, few have anything else to say about Castro because really, there isn’t all that much to this app.