Audiobookshelf helps solve two of my big needs with audios (books and podcasts). Excellent piece of software. Please throw some cash to them if you end up deploying.
Found this recently and loving it. Only issue I have is it loads every episode of a podcast when you click on the podcast, so if you have a pod with 1000 episodes, you're gonna be waiting a few seconds when you click on it. Makes it feel sluggish.
Antenna pod and other apps load the pod instantly with a handful of episodes and then load more if you scroll. That makes way more sense.
I might be an outlier since I listen to most of my podcasts at home on my desktop. I subscribe to RSS feeds in Thunderbird, download and play them on VLC. Since I'm a bit of a hoarder I also like to create my own offline archive folders of favourite podcasts which is often harder to do with a dedicated app.
Podcast Addict - Only for Android right now, but only allows the permissions it needs. The website does explain that ad networks that come from the RSS feeds may get your IP location, but that's it.
first time hearing about an open source podcast app like antenna. I'd definitely give it a try. been switching to a lot of FOSS apps lately so hell yeah!
Not much of privacy, but I use Spotify for podcasts. Usually when I am commuting or during chores.
I would love to use a privacy oriented solution but it is difficult to have privacy and not have to micromanage my paymants to creator, Spotify does it automatically for me.
I pay the Spotify subscription and they spread it according to my activity. I don't have to track myself the dozens or content creators and probability hundreds of artists to make sure I pay them fair procentage of my usage.
If anything, I may consider a self-hosted solution like Audiobookshelf, as I need my progress to be synchronized across many devices, including desktop web browser, something Google Podcasts does well for me, in my opinion.