There’s a paradox about podcast discovery that always bothers me: I want to explore new shows and ideas, but most apps keep recommending the same ones in a loop. It’s also one reason I don’t love options like Spotify and Overcast as much as I used to.
Recently, however, I came across a podcast app that actually finds exciting new podcasts: boxlore. Since then, I’ve relied on it instead of Spotify and Overcast to listen to my favorites and broaden the range of shows I listen to.
boxlore’s AI feed recommendations are exceptionally good
You can type a mood, an idea, or a question to find shows
For starters, boxlore is a completely free, ad-free podcast companion app available for Android, and you can download it from the Google Play Store. At its core, boxlore offers almost all the features you expect from a podcast app, including playback, queueing, downloads, alerts, widgets, etc.
Yet my reason for choosing boxlore over Spotify and Overcast is its effective recommendation system, which processes everything on-device. This recommendation system starts working the moment you set up boxlore for the first time. It gives you three options: build a personalized feed with AI help, choose shows from a list, or import your library from another device.
This AI Feed Assistant does magic because it actually asks meaningful questions before recommending options. Once you answer these questions, boxlore lets you choose a few shows from the list before building its recommendations.
Equally impressive is the podcast app’s intuitive search function. When you open the search bar from the Explore tab, boxlore shows a few options, but you can easily type your mood, idea, or something else to find a suitable podcast — and the results are spot-on. You can even ask a question, like “how does a black hole work?”, and boxlore can find the right podcasts.
I’ve been having a lot of fun using these intuitive search mechanisms to find interesting podcast titles.
My For You tab widened my taste instead of narrowing it
Spotify kept feeding me the same five shows for months
With other podcast apps like Spotify, I felt like I was listening to the same thing every month! With boxlore, though, my taste broadened as I was introduced to more versatile podcasts. If you are always looking for new knowledge and presentation styles, you’ll love this feature too.
The app also offers several ways to find trending podcasts and ideas locally or globally. The For You section of the Explore page is something great. This section of boxlore keeps changing depending on what you listen to (and what you skip). If you’d rather follow what others are listening to, you can also use the Top section, which has country-based and category-based top charts.
I’ve been using both these sections lately to enrich my podcast library. Like other podcast apps, boxlore also recommends episodes and related shows.
Daily Mix and the Boxlore Brief are two other things I’ve grown used to. Daily Mix provides a curated collection of episodes I can jump right into, and these recommendations are almost always spot-on. The Boxlore Brief, on the other hand, provides a daily summary of trending stories. These AI-powered summaries also let me jump into individual episodes right away. Once again, boxlore can give you location-specific summaries.
Overall, boxlore has made it effortless to find new podcasts that I love listening to.
The small details Spotify never bothered building
Live transcripts, tappable chapters, matching colors
A podcast app recommending impressive shows is one thing, but being usable is another! Fortunately, this app delivers enough on that front that I stopped using Spotify altogether.
First, boxlore has one of the best, most intuitive UI designs I’ve seen in podcast apps. It makes it effortless to find the right podcast and start playing it. I also love how buttery smooth the built-in transitions are. The best features of boxlore are also the small details that apps like Spotify never bothered to add. All these contribute to a smooth playback experience.
The playback screen is easy to navigate and houses all the buttons you’d need, including speed control, sleep timer, download, queueing, transcripts, etc. The episode notes are also tucked in neatly at the bottom. The Episode and Podcast views are easy to track, and the app integrates recommendations at the right points.
I also loved the organization options that boxlore offers. I can set custom tags on podcasts to keep them in a single folder. The Library tab also offers an organized way to access subscriptions, liked episodes, downloads, and listening history. The tab also lets me catch up on newly released episodes.
Other standard features include Android Auto support, video podcast playback, OPML import/export, and JSON-based backups. It can also sync with live transcripts whenever they are available from a show.
boxlore gets almost everything right
After testing this app for a couple of weeks, I honestly couldn’t find a caveat. Sure, it doesn’t offer cloud sync yet, but the export/import system serves me well for now. Apart from this, boxlore has been an almost perfect way to listen to podcasts on my Android smartphone, and it doesn’t consume a lot of resources, either. I should also mention that it outperforms my earlier favorites, like AntennaPod, in areas like search and recommendations!