The New App From Wondery Plays It Safe With First Stand-Alone Offering

As announced in Variety this week, Wondery, the podcast company known for great True-Crime dramas like Dr. Death, Bad Batch, and Over My Dead Body, launched their own stand-alone app to promote their shows to listeners and hopefully get them to sign up for Wondery Plus currently $4.99 per month or $34.99 for an annual subscription.

The app is free and available now, and while I like the look of it, I didn’t find anything revolutionary in its design.

When you open the app, you see a turquoise background and their logo with their tagline: “Wondery: Feel the Story”. I was very surprised that I didn’t hear their “sonic logo” when it turned on. This to me felt like a missed branding opportunity as CEO Hernan Lopez has previously said that their sonic logo “signals to the consumer that a great story is about to start.” I know this is doable because the podcast app SPKR has been doing this for about half a year.

I like SPKR’s idea of starting with sound, and while the Wondery app has a video trailer for their new show Murder in Hollywoodland playing when you turn the app on, for some reason they made the decision to have the sound muted on the app by default with no way to change that in the settings.

The Wondery app follows the now industry standard design of horizontal and vertical scrolling through their curated categories ala Netflix. Wondery has a great selection of original programming that makes it easy to explore new shows you didn’t know about and find new favorites, however partner shows from MSNBC and USA Today like The Sneak and Bag Man do not appear in their listings even though you can easily find them on Wondery’s list of shows on their website. Clearly this is a licensing issue that if resolved will greatly bolster this solidly made app.

Pick a show to listen to and gorgeous cover art appears, taking up just over half of the screen. When playing, you have the option to skip forward 30 seconds or backwards 15 seconds in addition to 4 different options in play speed time 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, and 2x. Oddly, you have to click through these options individually instead of bringing up a pop-up menu like the Spotify app does.

Subscribe to a show and it appears in your library while the info button adds helpful show notes on the right side of the screen. There’s a search bar, but this tool is a bit underdeveloped at launch and was unable to find specific show episode titles I typed in as well as not listing the exact show that I was looking for first. For instance, a search for the words “the oath” produced Hope in Darkness at the top, followed by The Daily Smile and then The Oath with Chuck Rosenberg.

Wondery is a great company with a fantastic slate of award-winning shows and currently sits at #3 on the Podtrac charts with a U.S. unique monthly audience of over 10 million, so I have no doubt that they will in time address some of these minor issues that prevent this app from being a home-run.

It’s a solid app that plays it safe and colors inside the lines. I’d give it three stars out of five.

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