[thpx86]

Yes, on the N900 (and the N800/N810) before that, gPodder was sharing most of the UI code even with the Gtk Desktop version (with some special-casing for the touch-friendly Hildon UI), and initially the "system" music player was used to play back podcasts. Panucci added support for resuming playback and a UI tailored towards audiobooks and podcasts.

Panucci is still around and should be usable on the Desktop, but the last commit was several years ago: https://github.com/gpodder/panucci

Starting with the N9 and later Sailfish OS, the UI of the mobile app was re-done in Qt/QML (so don't name your project after the toolkit of the day...). There, audio playback was integrated into the main application, so there was no need for a separate app like Panucci (this also made it easier to sync fine-grained playback positions between devices using gpodder.net, although this also works with MPRIS2 and e.g. VLC on the Desktop these days).