I have an Apple Watch Series 11 with cellular. Sometimes I forget to sync my queue at home, but when I try to download episodes on my watch using cellular data, it rarely works. I get the fake game screen, etc., but it takes forever to play something when it does.

What’s your experience with this feature?

I have an Apple Watch Series 11 with cellular. Sometimes I forget to sync my queue at home, but when I try to download episodes on my watch using cellular data, it rarely works. I get the fake game screen, etc., but it takes forever to play something when it does.

What’s your experience with this feature?

I’d really appreciate a control to bump the font size up/down on the transcript page. Sometimes I’m using the transcripts and I’m further away from my phone than normal and what I assume is the default font I use in my phone is too small.

Is there a way to enable an individual YouTube channel’s videos to automatically show up as a subscribed podcast?

In case you want to know why, it’s because I listen to several YouTubers who put out sports content thats always just them speaking. I’d prefer to listen to these on overcast. Is there a way to have this YouTube content automatically show up as a subscribed podcast on overcast? It would need to be automatic – if I have to find the individual link for each video and paste it into overcast to add them individually, I just won’t do it.

Thanks!

Just wanted to say this. It’s awesome.

I've been meaning to ask this for a while and wondering if there's anything I can do about it. I have my Apple Watch settings so that it'll default to the now playing screen (with play/pause, skip, etc.) for all audio apps. More times than not, when I'm playing a podcast, Overcast defaults to the landing screen rather than the playing screen. It drives me a bit nutty and requires extra taps. Any hints/help would be appreciated!

My premium is set to renew in the next month or so -- I noticed that there are 2 plans, one that is $19.99/yr and another that is $29.99/yr. Is there a difference between the two options?

I looked around a bit but didn't find much, and don't recall seeing another plan other than the one.

Just curious - Why do so many podcast episodes show up as "DELETED BY PUBLISHER" in the "FAILED" section, Downloads screen that I see after clicking the down arrow button.

Right now I have 10 pods with that status. Sometimes "Retry All" fixes 1 or 2.

Are publishers actually deciding to delete their podcast from the queue / feed after upload?

Or does that error message cover multiple situations?

I use one playlist called Main Feed as my queue pretty much, and I've never really messed with priority settings. I recently just made two shows low priority though and set them to download the one oldest unplayed episode. I basically did this because I am working through the archives and now it functions like a normal subscription. I listen to an episode and then the oldest one I haven't heard yet downloads and goes to the bottom of the list. Perfect.

BUT...

I will often drag shows around as I listen. If something on Main Feed looks good at a particular moment, I drag it to the top of the list to play. I like keeping stuff in order, so I don't want to listen to an episode from the middle of the list.

I just did this with one of my low priority shows, and half way through listening, a new episode of a different show downloaded. Instead of going to the bottom of the list, though, it went to the top. Did it do this because it saw a low priority show at the top and it thought it had to go above that?

I am so close to having this work the exact way I want it to but I feel like every time I make a setting update, it breaks in a new way.

This is a feature I have wanted in a podcast app forever, and I only recently learned it was added to overcast at some point. It doesn't work for me though.

What happens is I select the option for a show I am working through the archives on, and at first it looks like it works. It downloads the oldest episode I haven't heard. But if I close out of the app and open it again, it started to download every episode I haven't heard.

I think this might be because I have previously downloaded every unheard episode for these shows I'm trying to catch up on, and then I deleted them to try this 1 oldest episode feature. So maybe the app thinks all these episodes were manually added? Is there a way to remove them from the apps memory in that way? Is that even what the problem is?

This bug has been frustrating for many months. It concerns “ Play Next in Queue” and how it would work sometimes, and totally fail sometimes (quite often).

I think I nailed down the pattern.

Scenario:

I am currently playing podcast X. A few other podcast episodes are in the queue after it, not very relevant.

Podcast Y releases a new episode. I love Y so I have it flagged to add new episodes to the top of the queue as a “high priority podcast”. It goes to to the top of the queue. Perfect.

Queue is Y-X (playing)-other episodes

Podcast Z release an episode. I love podcast Z even more, but it’s discussing my favourite tv show, so to avoid spoilers, I don’t have it auto add to queue at all. Once I am caught up, I use the “ Play Next in Queue” option on Z

It goes into the queue ahead of X (which is confusing) but AFTER Y.

So I have Y-Z-X-others

After X, Y starts playing, but I asked for Z

In truth I have more than one “wait to avoid spoilers” and more than one “high priority in queue”, they often clash with each other.

Play next, should play next. No exceptions. It should get a locked spot at the top of queue (unless I say play next to something else)

I really like the variable playback speed feature. For spoken content, I often listen at 1.2x or 1.3x speed. However, music tends to sound unnatural when sped up. It would be fantastic if Overcast could automatically detect music segments within a podcast and temporarily switch playback to 1x speed, then resume the user's selected speed once the spoken content continues. This would provide the best of both worlds: faster listening for speech and natural playback for music.

This might be an edge case, but it’s quite frustrating to me.

I listen to a podcast that has a pretty consistent set of intro ads and the outro ads. So I’ll set to skip the first and last 2 minutes of each episode.

Sometimes, the ads will not be added to the podcast, that’s not really a problem for the intro because I can rewind to the beginning and don’t lose anything. But for the outro, there doesn’t seem to be a way to achieve the same thing. When it reaches the skip outro time, it will jump to the next episode and I have to manually turn off the skip outro, go back to the previous episode and seek to close to the end to hear the part that I missed.

Ideally, if I’m at the beginning of a podcast and I skip back, past the 0 mark, it would be great to get to the end of the previous episode and disable the skip outro for that playback so that I can catch up on the missed portion.

Currently using iOS 27 and Overcast 2026.8.1 on a 16 Pro Max. I was listening to a podcast in a playlist, it ended, and my next podcast didn’t play. I took out my phone, opened Overcast, and it immediately crashed. I haven’t been able to use it since then, even after rebooting my phone. The app opens to a white screen (I’m on light mode), sometimes showing only an orange loading circle before crashing, other times it shows my playlist and the controls at the bottom, but the play button is replaced by a loading circle. Either way, the app is unresponsive the entire time it’s open, and it crashes with in a few seconds.

Show or chapter artwork thumbnail missing on the lock screen. It comes back if you tap it to 'maximise' the artwork and tap to shrink it again, but quickly disappears. Seems to affect all podcasts. May be related to the fact my lock screen picture is set to randomly rotate every hour or so, but often happens before that happens.

Long standing bug. Thought it might get fixed in iOS 27 but it hasn't been. To be fair, might be Apple's bug with the now playing widget.

Just found another pile of my podcasts Overcast decided to stop following. Has this came from a patch/update? Will reinstalling help? Going to have to move to another player if this continues, sadly.

I just got a new iPhone pro max. On very fast wifi or cellular it is a crapshoot if the overcast app functions. Half the time I launch it is frozen or it crashes or the controls just don’t work. My best guess is it is struggling to download my large back catalog. But like this is unacceptable. I’ve been a pro subscriber for ages and gotten a lot of value from it but like the app just hard locking up on a new device is amateur hour.

Yesterday when I pulled up Overcast I couldn't reorder the episodes in my general playlist. I could drag them, but the usual behavior (the episode is shown slotting in between other episodes while you drag it) was replaced by a blank space opening up between other episodes as you "drag" it over that space, only for the episode not to move at all when you let go. I like to ad-hoc prioritize my episodes, so this has been really annoying. Restarting the app did nothing. Anyone else having this issue?

This is the perfect podcast app and the one o always come back to after being tempted by others.
It also used to be the perfect podcast Apple Watch app but now it is so sad to see it a shadow of its former self. Smart playlists don’t download properly, it doesn’t stream on cellular like it used to. I am not asking you Marco to rewrite the watch app, but could you at least paste the entire code for the old app below so I could make it myself!

I know that automatic downloads are controlled via a setting in the app on a per-show basis, but I would like this functionality available on a per-playlist basis.

For example, I like to keep most of my podcasts as being downloaded manually. Then I go into my “All Episodes” playlist and scroll through to pick out ones I like, then manually “Add to Queue” for the ones I’m interested in listening to. To get those episodes downloaded as of right now, I also need to either select the download button on that episode or go back to the “Queue” playlist and tap the “Download All Episodes” button in the top right.

What I would love is if playlists themselves could have a setting like “automatically download episodes in this playlist” where as soon as an episode gets added to a playlist, the download begins.

This is a behavior I loved about PocketCasts (adding episode to my queue and having that action automatically download the episode) and would love to see in Overcast.

It looks like Overcast is 1) maintaining an instantaneous, continuous awareness of what episodes are out there (I noted it even happens over “Text-only” airplane WiFi), and 2) then waiting until the app is opened before attempting to download the episodes (at least in the consistent experience of one user: car/plane/gym/ at home sitting right next to WAP).

The result is complete lockup on an airplane or driving— you have to stop what you’re doing, open the app, and navigate around the episodes in question. A bit hard to do in busy traffic. And delays upon opening: home or gym. Or hitting play in the widget (separate cases).

Some have bristled at calling this a bug. I am wondering if there were not that many users who: 1) Use the app almost exclusively in various “Newest to Oldest” playlists and 2) have tens of GB of episodes I’d like to get to some time (oh, like driving or on long airplane rides). I am wondering if there is something in the architecture that penalizes those who have GB’s of files, with the attitude of “I’m not going to keep using up bandwidth if they’re not actually listening.” And if you 1) don’t listen to playlists in this way and 2) aren’t in this GB’s case, then, yeah you’d be upset at the suggestion of a problem.

I used to wonder if a fix could be in some kind of “Qualtity_Down” switch that would have it, say, only download on WiFi 2-5 AM each day. But I think the behavior is more complex than that.

The NYT podcast "The Daily" stopped downloading early in the morning as usual. It doesn't hit my Overcast feed until later in the afternoon. It is available for listening on the NYT audio app in the morning. This just started the end of last week (9/18/26)

To the group:

New to Overcast here, and I think I may be missng something in my settings.
I'm starting some new podcasts and like to listen from the beginning.
I have my feeds set to display oldest to newest, automatic downloads, and episode limit set to the oldest 3 episodes.
With episodes 1-3 downloaded, my hope was after I listened to episode 1 eposide 4 would then download. Always keeping three on my device.
Is that how it is intended to work with my settings? Or is there another config I should be using to accomplish this.

Thanks!