Your experience with Patreon will depend on what kind of thing you're supporting.

For example, if you support a Youtube channel you might continue watching on Youtube and rarely need to visit Patreon's website at all.

But if you support an author who is releasing a book, three pages per day? And you're paying for early access? You'll notice there's no bookmarking / next page features.

And if that author has three price tiers, depending on how many pages of early access you get? Only the most expensive tier can get new-pages-uploaded e-mails - new pages being unlocked for lower tiers isn't an event that triggers notification e-mails.

Okay

The author is charging more for access to the feature you want. You need to pay more to get that benefit, just like you need to pay more for early access or whatever other perks are offered.

It's not impossible - but usually authors are pretty keen to advertise what the higher tiers give you.

Which is generally more advance chapters. Maybe discord benefits, extra side-story chapters, access to in-progress/draft chapters, or author Q&A sessions. I've never seen notification e-mails listed as a benefit.

Almighty coincidence that e-mail notifications are always reserved for the earliest access tier, but every author has forgotten to advertise the benefit.

How can they "get out of the way" when you need to use the app to play the content?

The player sucks, episode search sucks.

I guess most creators I watch tend to link to unlisted youtube videos to share with their patrons rather than use Patreon's built in uploads.

Same here, the only ones that don't do that upload to Vimeo and link that in the Patreon update.

This and private feeds for podcasts

Oh. I wish more did that.

Yeah, I think the sibling comment has a point that I hadn't thought of. It does seem to depend on what you support. I currently have about 10 Patreon subscriptions, and zero where I consume any content at all via the Patreon website or app. I get that if people need to do that, it would be frustrating. (In fact, for the vast majority of the stuff I support on Patreon, I don't really consume any exclusive content or use any benefits. I support them because I like the main thing they do and I want to toss a few bucks their way, not because I want any rewards or exclusives.)

Creators can use ehatver they want. In one case, I was just given access to a private Google Drive folder.

Wow. The medieval ages were 600 years ago.

Dark Mode, faster content delivery and a batch download function. Some DRM system for creators would also be interesting.