1 is the closest to the status quo.

2 seems safe, but I don't love the toolbar-style buttons floating in the middle like that.

Leaning toward 3 myself, but it's pretty different from the status quo.

Do you have a clear preference?

Everyone loves this one! I did, too, as a screenshot. But I build and use all of my designs to test them. This one’s downsides:

- It confuses the sheet-presentation metaphor

- When swiped to the show notes, it creates 3 levels of card depth, which is cluttered and doesn't fit the 26 design

- It needs a lot of vertical padding, which pushes the playback controls quite far down

This is why I build and live with my designs. I wouldn't find these tradeoffs in mockups or screenshots alone.

I've been using this design today. I think it looks great in screenshots, and improves a lot of those issues, especially in show-notes view (which lets the content scroll under the glass ad capsule).

In practice, though, it has a fatal flaw:

It always looks like I have a notification. And that's very distracting when it's sitting on a counter as I do stuff and I see it out of the corner of my eye.

Which I never would’ve realized until I lived with it on my phone for half a day.