As an users of Pocket Casts I can not live without:

• Skip intros customised per podcasts. Some podcast have from 1 min to 5-6 minutes of advertising . You can easily forget about that. When you listen a lot of podcasts, all of that time adds up very quickly.
• Variable speed/trim silence customised per podcast. Some podcasters speak faster. Some topics are more complex and details must be listen more carefully to fully get the most of the episodes.
• History of listened episodes.
• Sync between platforms. I can start to listen to an episode in the Macbook and finish it on the go in my phone.

Some stats from Pocket Casts:

Screenshot_20200615-195834_Pocket Casts1440×3040 377 KB

I use Pocket Casts. It is multi-platform and it covers all I need.
https://www.pocketcasts.com

Last I tried to listen to podcasts in Spotify, there wasn’t a way to “mark as watched”. The same goes for listening to audiobooks with Spotify. If I had already read chapter 1, there’s no way to tell Spotify. The lack of such a basic features really turns me off from using the product at all.

iTunes / Apple Podcasts keeps wanting to sort descending by date, such that the newest is on top. That seems really odd to me. I would like my audiobook and podcasts in chronological order with the oldest (first) at the top and the newest (last) on the bottom.