Podcini

Podcini is what happens when a proficient Android developer looks at AntennaPod, decides the code needs a full rebuild in modern tooling, and just does it. Xilin Jia forked AntennaPod in early February 2024 and rewrote it in pure Kotlin against Jetpack Compose and Media3, then kept adding features the original app has intentionally kept out of scope.

What it does differently

Two things separate Podcini from the app it was born out of. The first is YouTube. Podcini treats YouTube channels and YouTube Music the same way it treats an RSS feed: paste a URL, add it, subscribe, listen. That's a philosophical departure from AntennaPod, which is deliberately RSS-only.

The second is depth of local metadata. Podcini lets you rate episodes on a five-point scale, mark them with a twelve-level play state, keep private notes per episode, and organise them into multiple play queues associated with any podcast. If you're the kind of listener who treats a podcast library the way other people treat a music library, this is unusually strong.

Under the hood, Media3 with AudioOffloadMode enabled means better battery on modern Android because the CPU sleeps more between audio buffer refills.

Where you get it

F-Droid and GitHub, both free. GPLv3, so any future forks stay open too.

Current stance

Actively developed by Xilin Jia as an individual maintainer with a growing contributor base. The project has kept a steady release cadence since its 2024 fork, and it's earned a place in F-Droid as a legitimate AntennaPod alternative rather than a rushed clone. If you want AntennaPod's ethics with more experimental UX and non-RSS content support, Podcini is the pick. If you want AntennaPod's ethics with the deep stability of a decade-long community project, stay with AntennaPod itself.

An open-podcasting proof point

Podcini is a live example of why open source matters for open podcasting. Because AntennaPod is GPLv3, anyone can take it, learn from it, and build the version they wish existed, without asking permission and without owing anyone equity. Whether or not you end up installing Podcini, the fact that it can exist at all is the point.