>Overcast (iOS) supposedly can block ads and skip intros/outros
Overcast intro and outro skip is a thing (that I use for most podcasts), but I've never seen anything like an ad-skipping feature. I listen to the developer's podcast (Accidental Tech Podcast) and he mentioned that ad detection and skipping is something that he's looked into and considering, but as far as I know it's not an overcast feature today.
I have an overcast next chapter action triggered by a Siri shortcut called “skip ad” — so I can just say “Siri, Skip Ad”. It works only if the podcast pervasively chapterizes of course, but thankfully most of mine do.
Paying $100 a year for a freaking podcast seems ridiculous to me, especially when there is no special cause behind it and the hosts are already rich af. But of course they are free to charge whatever they want.
I don’t think it can skip automatically. I’m an Overcast user, and haven’t heard of this - and can’t find the feature now that I look.
It does have configurable “skip forward” and “skip backward” _times_, and will skip to and resume from between words instead of inside words - so it’s easier to manually skip than in some other apps - but I don’t think there’s anything automatic.
[Edit: Oh! It can skip a configurable amount of time from the start and end of playback of any podcast! It’s still manual though.]
I used Audacity to excerpt a clip from a podcast the other day and the ads were obvious just from the shape of the waveform. The ad section waveforms were half the height of the rest of the podcast. I don't know how representative that one podcast is.
Overcast intro and outro skip is a thing (that I use for most podcasts), but I've never seen anything like an ad-skipping feature. I listen to the developer's podcast (Accidental Tech Podcast) and he mentioned that ad detection and skipping is something that he's looked into and considering, but as far as I know it's not an overcast feature today.