Metacast

Metacast is a modern podcast app for iPhone, Android, and Apple Vision, built by Metacast Inc (led by Ilya Bezdelev) around a specific idea: spoken-word audio should be as searchable and skimmable as any other kind of information. It's a serious tool for the people who use podcasts to learn, not just to fill time.

The transcript-first design

Metacast's centre of gravity is the transcript. Every episode you play gets a full transcript with speaker labels and visual cues for non-speech moments (music, ambient noise, applause). The transcript is fully searchable across your library, so you can find "the episode where they talked about magnesium" without remembering which show or which episode number. Metacast also handles private RSS feeds (Patreon, Substack, and similar) natively, so paid membership shows work alongside your open subscriptions.

What else it does

Alongside the transcripts, the app runs the modern podcast player features you'd expect: playback speed with silence-skip, chapters, offline downloads, sleep timer, and Apple CarPlay / Android Auto. There's playlist support. The free tier lets you use most of the app; the Premium subscription ($4.99/mo or $49.99/yr) unlocks full-transcript access across your library and unlimited playlists.

Where you get it

iOS App Store (iOS 15+, macOS 12+ on Apple Silicon, and visionOS 1+ on Apple Vision) and Google Play. No Windows or Linux app.

Current stance

Actively developed by a small team. Metacast also runs a "Metacast: Behind the scenes" podcast, which is unusually transparent for a podcast-app developer: they discuss product decisions, business realities, and open-podcasting industry moves in real time. If you want a similar transcript-first learning-focused approach with a much heavier AI layer, Snipd is the natural sibling. If you want the same transcripts-in-a-normal-player angle from the open-source camp, Podverse ships that too.