I'll begin by saying that Podcast Republic is a very good app that makes it easy to find new podcasts, manage your subscriptions and organize your playlists. But when something goes wrong it's not immediately obvious how to fix it. Hence this review.

I had just started playing a new episode when Podcast Republic suddenly kicked me back out to the Kindle menu. Every time I tried to start the app again, it did the same thing after about a half second. This was the first time I had ever experienced a problem with it. I absolutely did not want to lose all my subscriptions, my play history and the episodes I had marked as favorites.

Under Settings > Applications > Manage All Applications > Podcast Republic, I tried the "force stop" option, the "clear cache" option, and both together, powering down and restarting the Kindle each time. None of these worked. I was reluctant to try "uninstall" or "clear data" lest I lose everything, so I emailed the developer and they were quick to respond, although from their replies it seemed like I was the first Kindle user who had ever had a problem. They kept directing me to Android phone-specific instructions for submitting a bug report, which obviously wouldn't work because the Kindle is not a phone.

What ultimately worked was, I connected the Kindle to a PC using the USB cable that came with it. In Windows Explorer I selected the Kindle and then its internal storage, and found a folder called "podcast.republic.data". This is where all of the subscription, playlist, play history and favorite episode data is stored. There are several files, named with the date they were taken. By default Podcast Republic backs this up regularly, under Settings > Backup & Restore within the app itself... although the settings say it's a weekly backup and mine was only backing up every 2 weeks for some reason. Anyway, I copied these files over to my PC, just in case. Then I uninstalled the Podcast Republic app on my Kindle, and reinstalled it from the Amazon app store.

When I went back in, it was working again, no more crashes. I went to Settings > Backup & Restore > Restore and found the "podcast.republic.data" folder. (NOT "PodcastRepublic", the folder you need is further down. For me it was at the very bottom of the list.) I found the "backup_yyyymmddhhmm.zip" file named with the most recent date and time (also at the bottom of the list), selected that and chose the restore option.

Using this method I got back most of my subscriptions, play history, and favorites. Except I'd lost about 2 weeks of activity - of course the crashing started on the 13th day after the last backup, one day before the next one would have occurred - and I had to go through all of my subscriptions, mark as played the episodes I'd already heard, delete the ones marked as downloaded (since they were no longer actually downloaded; the actual downloads were cleared out when I uninstalled the app), work from memory to re-favorite any episodes I'd particularly liked, and re-download everything I hadn't played yet.

So that was a real pain in the butt, but still better than trying to recreate my entire history from scratch. I now have an automatic reminder set up to manually back up the data every few days, since the two-week gap is a bit too long for me. (I listen to a LOT of podcasts at work.) It would be nice to have the option to select how often the automatic backup runs. Maybe in a future release? The developers of Podcast Republic do regularly update and enhance their app. And I want to thank them again for being so quick to respond to my help request. In the era of unresponsive and uncaring companies, getting a timely response from a developer who actually helped was an indescribable relief.

Brand	N/A
Rating	3.7 (617 ratings)
Price	$N/A
Category	Podcasts

Podcast Republic - Podcast Player & Podcast App