Airshow: A Lightweight App for People Who Like Podcasts

by Ben Ubois

Introducing Airshow. It’s a podcast player for iPhone & iPad. It syncs with the Feedbin account you already have.

Download it now from the App Store.

The idea for the first version is simple: a podcast app that has only the features required to actually listen to and enjoy the shows you love.

There are many great podcast apps out there, so why make another one? Two reasons:

  1. To add value to your Feedbin subscription.
  2. To see if there is an opportunity to make something simpler and nicer than the existing options.

There are two ways I think about podcasts. Entertainment or informational. The design philosophy behind Airshow is to treat podcasts as entertainment where the words, and the space between words are part of the medium. So for now it omits some features you might be used to like speed control or sound effects.

It also takes a lightweight approach to organizing your podcasts. Playlists, folders, etc… provide a lot of flexibility, but they also make it to easy to oversubscribe and bury shows that you subscribe to aspirationally. Instead there’s one place to go to listen: your queue. The idea here is to spend less time managing and just subscribe to shows you actually want to listen to.

New episodes for shows you subscribe to get automatically added to your queue. For podcasts where you only want to listen to the occasional episode, there’s bookmarks. From here you can browse episodes and manually choose what to download.

There are three ways to use Airshow:

  • Sync with your existing Feedbin account at no additional cost
  • Completely free without sync
  • A new Airshow only sync plan priced at $19.99/year

This goal for now is to get the basics right and to have a simple, lovable and complete product. Please give it a try if that sounds like something you might enjoy.