Getting started with 4a

There is nothing to install, no account to make and nothing to configure before it works. This page is here for the parts that are not obvious, and for what the first week actually feels like.

Open 4a — it is a web address. If you are on your phone, that is already the whole setup.

The first thirty seconds

You will see four cards. A short introduction sits above them explaining what they are; you can dismiss it and it stays dismissed.

Tap a card and you get its queue: the episodes in it, in order, with a total running time. Tap an episode and it opens in whichever podcast app you already use. That is the loop.

One of the four cards carries a Stretch badge. That one is deliberately not about a subject you have shown an interest in — see why it exists — and if it looks like a mistake on day one, it is not. It is the point.

Put it on your home screen

4a is a web app that installs. Once it is on your home screen it gets its own icon and its own window, with no browser furniture, and it starts the way an app starts.

On iPhone or iPad: open 4a in Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen.

On Android: open 4a in Chrome, open the browser menu, then Install app or Add to Home screen, depending on your version.

On a desktop: most browsers show an install control in the address bar. It works, and it is genuinely more pleasant than a tab.

You do not have to do any of this. Everything works in a normal tab.

The two settings worth knowing about

Both are in the menu behind the ☰ button.

Open in. Which podcast app an episode hands off to. Change it once and forget it.

Family mode. Hides episodes rated explicit, and also hides the whole comedy category — because older comedy items in the library predate per-episode ratings and we would rather over-hide than let one through. It is a blunt rule and we say so; the features page explains why blunt is the right shape here.

What the first week looks like

Honest version, because the alternative is you concluding it is broken.

Day one the picks are built from very little. 4a does not ask you to describe yourself — there is no questionnaire, no "choose five interests" screen — so on the first day it is working from almost nothing and the queues will be broad.

By the end of the first week it has watched what you opened, what you skipped, what you saved and what you finished, and the three non-Stretch queues start looking like yours. What moves the needle fastest is opening things — including opening something and abandoning it, which is a real signal and not a failure.

The Stretch queue never converges, by design. If it ever starts feeling comfortable, something has gone wrong.

If you want to skip the wait, type what you want into the build me a playlist field. That works from the first minute and does not need any history.

If you want to shortcut the learning

Three things tell 4a more, faster:

• Save things with the star, even ones you do not play immediately.
• Mark something done with the ✓ on the Continue strip when you finish it.
• Use more like and less like where you already know the answer instead of waiting to demonstrate it.

Offline

The app and its library listing are cached, so 4a opens and renders with no connection. Audio is never cached, so playing something needs one. Worth knowing before a flight.

Things that will look like bugs and are not

• The same show appearing in two queues. Queues are subjects, and a show can legitimately be about two subjects.
• A queue with one episode in it. The card says how many; a queue of one is a subject where there was one good thing rather than four mediocre ones.
• A playlist flagged as thin. 4a found less than it wanted and told you, instead of padding it with filler.
• An empty result offering different subjects. That is the intended behaviour for a query the library cannot answer.
• Nothing to resume. The Continue strip only appears for something long enough that resuming is the point, and it expires rather than following you around.

It is early software

4a is new, the library changes, and features move. If something reads as broken it may well be, and one email address reaches the people who can fix it: help@jwlabs.ai.

The support page says what to include so a report can actually be acted on — in particular, for anything to do with audio, the built-in Playback diagnostics record, which lives on your device and is never sent anywhere unless you copy it into an email yourself.

Where to go next