Castro

Castro is the iOS podcast app that made "triage" a first-class concept, and it's the most stylistically distinctive player in this directory. It's been under three ownership groups in ten years, and its future has looked uncertain more than once, but as of 2026 the app is back and shipping.

Origins

Castro was built by Supertop, a two-person Dublin studio run by Pádraig Ó Cinnéide and Oisín Prendiville, who released the original in 2014. Castro 2, in 2016, was the version that made the app famous: a rewritten inbox-based UX built around the observation that most heavy podcast listeners subscribe to more shows than they can keep up with, so the app's job is to help you triage what's arriving rather than pretend everything gets played.

The Inbox

Every new episode from every show you subscribe to lands in the Inbox with the title, description, and duration on a card. You swipe left to archive, swipe right to queue. It sounds small; in practice it's the thing that turns a chaotic subscription list back into a functional listening habit. The Inbox refuses the "listen to everything" pressure other apps quietly encourage, and it makes an app that gets progressively better as your subscription count grows, not worse.

Ownership changes

Supertop sold Castro in 2018 to Tiny, a Vancouver-based holding company, which put it under Tiny Wins as a small team maintaining the app. In 2023 Castro went through a rough patch: outages, silence from the maintainers, and speculation the app might be quietly discontinued. In 2024 Bluck Apps acquired Castro and, as of 2026, is actively developing it again. The Inbox model is intact and the app is stable, though power users will notice the release cadence isn't quite what it was in the Supertop days.

Where you get it

iOS App Store, free to install with a Castro Plus subscription for premium features (background auto-download, enhanced voices, per-podcast custom playback settings, chapter navigation, and a Watch app). Pricing is monthly or annual.

Current stance

Independent and iOS-only. Castro has always been a small-team app that competes on taste and idea, not on feature count. If you subscribe to a lot of shows and feel like they own you rather than the other way round, Castro is the app to try. If you want the same "listen to less, better" philosophy on Android, Pocket Casts' filter presets and AntennaPod's queue rules will get you close.