Podcini is really great! It modernizes the Antennapod codebase (we wouldnt believe but that is pretty outdated!) and makes it more efficient.
Differing from the forked project, this project is purely Kotlin based, relies on the most recent dependencies, and most importantly has migrated the media player to androidx.media3, and added mechanism of AudioOffloadMode which is supposed to be kind to device battery. Efficiencies are also sought on running the app. App build is also upgraded to target Android 14.
After some hiccups at the beginning, it is now in a very good state!
Yeah dont know either why a fork is needed. It is a port to various modern Android standards and libraries, so it is absolutely needed and not necessarily a deviation.
I think the changes are okay, but not needed.