App of the Week: Swell serves you micro podcasts

Just listening to a podcast when you’re on your way to work or folding the laundry: a very good plan in itself, but if you work 5 minutes from your house and have done a towel wash, then an entire podcast is much too long. That’s why in this App of the Week we look at Swell, an app that lets you listen to micro-podcasts.

Swell

A podcast of half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour: some people swear by it, while others either can’t find a good time for it, or simply don’t have the tension for it. Swell is an app that you can think of as the ‘Vine’ of podcasting. It can all be nice and short. Have you written a 1 minute poem? Do you want to say in 4 minutes how annoying it is that your smartphone has received an update and what is wrong with it? You can lose that kind of stuff on Swell.

It’s a good invention, because it means you don’t have to set up an entire podcast full of topics, but you can say exactly what you want to say. As a listener, you can in turn choose very specifically for certain topics that you want to hear more about, instead of having to listen to all the different topics that come up in a podcast -which you may find considerably less interesting-. You can search for a movie you’ve just seen and wonder what others think, or you can listen to interviews with people you find interesting.

Micro Podcasts

When setting up your profile, the app asks you which topics you find interesting, so that you can already see some topics on your feed that you may find interesting. You can also search yourself, of course, because to be honest: Swell’s algorithm is not perfect. It is better to look for all kinds of topics that you find interesting yourself than to rely on an algorithm. Plus, if you’ve found a Swell creator you like, you can follow that person and get their audio recordings right in your feed.

Swell has a bit of a social media build, which is reflected not only in the look of the app, but also in the professionalism of the recordings. They’re not super slick recordings, just people saying something into their phones. That is actually very cool, because you really have the feeling that you are being transported to that person for a while. One will find it disturbing that the sound is not ultimate, but that makes this a very authentic app. Are you curious about what others have to say? Try this app: it is free to use and works very intuitively, although the recommendations could be a little better in our opinion.

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App of the Week

You’ll find one every Monday at Androidworld Best apps of the week and every Saturday we discuss an app in our section app of the week. If you are looking for fun apps, then you’ve come to the right place at Androidworld. Search our large database of apps using the links below.

Have you ever tried Swell? What do you think of this type of podcast? Leave it now in the comments to this article.

Photo credit: Jus de Voyage