Introducing xadcast¶

10 September 2026

xadcast is an ordinary, pleasant podcast app with one trick: it finds the ad breaks in every episode and skips them, and it does all of that on your phone.

Why on the device¶

Most podcast networks use dynamic ad insertion. The ads are stitched into the audio when you download it, so two people fetching the same episode get different files with ads in different places. A shared database of "the ad is at 12:40" cannot work, because there is no single 12:40. The only copy that matters is the one on your device, so that is where detection runs.

Each episode is transcribed locally while you listen, and every stretch of speech is scored by a small model trained to recognise adverts, both the pre-recorded spots and the host reads. The player skips what it finds, draws the skipped stretch on the seek bar, and lets you tap it to hear the break anyway. Wrongly skipping real content is the one mistake that makes people uninstall a podcast app, so everything is biased towards leaving audio alone when in doubt.

Nothing you listen to is sent anywhere. There is no account, no analytics, and no advertising SDK. The models ship inside the app, so it works from the first episode without downloading anything extra.

Where things stand¶

The app is in development for Android and iOS and is not yet on the stores. Progress is written up on the releases page, and the download page will carry the store links as soon as they exist.