Review: Wondery
Seeing as 2020 has been a year that seriously needs a reboot, many of us have found new pastimes. Podcasts are one of those pastimes. That’s where Wondery comes in. Available in iOS and Android flavors, Wondery is the world’s largest independent podcast publisher and they’ve recently launched in Canada. Which meant that I had to take a look at it.
The thing about podcasts is that there are a lot of them out there. Wondery has a selection of high quality podcasts that cover a variety of topics. And the app is very easy to use. Let me show you:
The user interface is very clean and easy to navigate. Simply by scrolling, I was able to find podcasts that caught my interest. And there was a lot of them that caught my interest. More on that in a minute.
When you find something that catches your interest, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to flip between different seasons as well as download episodes to your phone so that you can listen to them on a plane….. Whenever we’re able to safely travel.
Another thing that I liked was the fact that there’s a lot detail on the podcasts so that you know what you’re getting yourself into. And I think that is the main strength of Wondery. There’s a ton of interesting content here that in the two days I have been using it have caught my interest. It also saves you the trouble of searching for interesting podcasts on your own, or the need to get recommendations from friends. I could easily spend days listening to content. The podcasts are very high quality from an audio perspective, and streaming them didn’t make a significant dent into my 6GB data plan during a drive to and from hiking over the weekend?
Gripes? Two very minor ones. The first is that Wondery needs an Apple CarPlay interface as that would make starting and controlling podcasts much easier. In my case, I had to start the podcast from my iPhone directly before driving off. Then I could control it from the Now Playing screen. But if I paused it and left it for more than a few minutes, the podcast would disappear. That would require me to pull over and use my phone to start the podcast again which is of course not exactly optimal (and depending on your location, expensive as using your phone while behind the wheel can result in an expensive ticket if you’re caught by the police). The second thing is that I would like to see more Canadian Content. When I did a search for “Canada” and “Canadian” as well as random Canadian cities, this is all that I could come up with:
Wondery has a lot of great content on tap. But Canadian content is something that is going to allow it to resonate with Canadian listeners.
Wondery has two subscription options starting with $4.99 monthly. Or you can pay $34.99 a year which is a 40% savings. From what I see here, it’s totally worth it given the content that is on tap. If you want top notch podcasts, but you don’t want to put the legwork to find them, Wondery is totally worth having on your phone or tablet.
UPDATE: The app coming soon on Android
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