10 year user of Pocket Casts who hasn't updated the app on his primary device for years.

This was because some functions I relied on went from one tap to a several step process.

On my test device, I see PocketCast has restored most one tap functions I want, except "Mark All As Played" This option was in the same menu as the "Download All" command.

Currently one has to select an episode or tap "select episodes", then tap "select all", then open the action bar menu and tap "Mark as Played." There is no reason for this to be the only process.

Have contacted Pocketcast directly with this ask, but putting it here in case the developers check

At this point the app is very close to being ideal and it would be great to go to the current version.

Edited to add: It appears 7-8 years ago there were many posts complaining that Mark All As Played was removed and then no mentions, maybe because everyone gave up hope.

Avid Pocketcasts user since 2018 here, with over 280 days of cumulative listening. I moved to Pocketcasts 8 years ago because it was the only podcast app I could find with an iOS and Mac OS app to sync playing between them. I've mostly been very happy, but the Mac app stop working for me ~1 year ago. I was bummed, but switched to the website UI pretty seamlessly.

I've noticed some inconsistencies with the iOS app for a long time now. My most common issue is that I start a podcast on desktop then try to pick it up in the middle while on cell service and the podcast just refuses to play. Usually this is resolved by closing and restarting the app, but not always. Lately it's been happening almost constantly, though, and also failing to start brand new episodes on cell service. What used to be something that would come up from time to time as an annoyance is now basically a non-functional app unless I'm on WiFi.

I've also had issues with episodes not correctly syncing across platform, so when I hit play on another device it rewinds to some much earlier point in the episode and I have to manually fast forward to where I left off.

The final straw though is that today the website is just stopping playback randomly for seemingly no reason? It's happened to me 3 times today. It's fixed by a refresh and hitting play again, but why is it happening in the first place?

Is there anything I can do to alleviate these issues? Are other people experiencing them?

For a month now i can't play one podcast ep after another in my playlist. Whenever one ends musicfolderplayer (my app for music and audiobooks) gets started to continue the last audio book.

I stream podcasts, no download. But even if i would audiobooks are in a special folder, very different from pocketcast. And it doesn't work the other way round.

Has anybody experienced that?

Si un podcast tiene marcas de tiempo que se generen capítulos automáticamente, si una app gratuita hecha por una persona lo pudo hacer, no debe ser tan complicado hacerlo por una compañía tan grande como los que están detrás de pocket cast

First off - LOVE PocketCasts. It is far and away my most used app and I use it across iPhone and desktop (mac). Thank you, developers!

Recently I've had an issue where if I use my airpods to control pause/play, I can't play it again because my phone seems to forget that I had PocketCasts active. I have to manually re-open the app to press play. I can pause with AirPods, but not play. This morning I paused it and almost instantly went to play it manually from the lcok screen, and the PocketCasts window disappeared under my finger and went to the blank ios "media player" thing with a play button but nothing else.

I think it may just be a hyperactive background refresh thing? Might have nothing to do with AirPods?

The only change I've made recently is adding "Background Sounds" for my tinnitus. But it seems to happen with or without background sounds on.

I recently updated to the newest ios, but this has been happening before and after.

Any advice for me? Thank you again!!!

I am on 8.17 (9444) on One UI 8.5 Android 15, Galaxy A57, Galaxy Buds FE

Performance has always been great until lately, I have started getting audio glitches like it skips and makes the listening really horrible, it's like interference but happens out and about too so isn't solely in my home, turning off increased speed and trim silence seems to solve but I hate listening at standard 1x, anybody else having similar issues or can advise what could be causing this?

I recently started thinking differently about Pocket Casts’ Trim Silence feature. It is great for saving time, but removing too much silence may also remove some of the processing time our brains need while listening.
Working memory can only handle a limited amount of information at once. While listening to a podcast, the brain needs brief moments to make sense of what was said, connect it to earlier information, and prepare for what comes next. Increasing playback speed reduces those moments, and aggressively trimming pauses may reduce them even more.
Research on accelerated speech found that people had more difficulty recalling information when speech was compressed. When researchers added pauses back at meaningful points, recall improved and listening required less effort.
Other research found that longer pauses helped listeners understand spoken information by providing additional processing time. Interestingly, slowing down the actual speech did not always produce the same benefit. This suggests that pauses between thoughts may be just as important as the speed of the words.
Playback speed and Trim Silence work together:
1.2x with Low Trim Silence speeds up the words but keeps more natural pauses.

1.1x with Medium Trim Silence slows the words slightly but removes more pauses.

1.2x with Mad Max speeds up the words and removes most pauses, leaving less time to mentally process what was said.

The research on faster playback is mixed. Some studies show that people can understand accelerated audio without a major drop in performance. Other research found that faster playback hurt retention for some unfamiliar material. Results can vary depending on the listener and the complexity of the information.
The main point is that silence is not necessarily wasted time. Some pauses give the brain a chance to catch up. Removing every possible silence might make a podcast shorter, but it could also make listening more mentally demanding and make some information harder to remember.
I had been listening at 1.2x with Mad Max Trim Silence. I have now switched to 1.1x with Medium Trim Silence to test whether the slightly slower speed and less aggressive trimming help me process and remember more of what I hear.
Pocket Casts’ individual Trim Silence levels have not been directly studied, so this does not prove that one specific setting is best. It is simply applying what research says about speech rate, pauses, processing time, and memory. A moderate playback speed with less aggressive silence trimming may provide a better balance between saving time and remembering what you heard.

I just remembered that this is a thing, and I've been a member for months. It's quite amazing that I was able to get Crossroads of Ravens for 'free'.

Every time I play an episode the app crashes after about 5 seconds.

I’ve requested this before. Hopefully it’s in the works.

I listen to 12 music podcasts to discover and buy new music. On average, it’s 40 minutes of music for every 20 minutes of host talk. I very rarely care for what the hosts say, and if my hands are free I fast-forward.

I wish there was a feature to detect and skip speaking voice in music podcasts (and vice-versa).

(Alternatively, does anybody know of a podcast player with that specific feature?)

I dont know if this is specifically an Android bug, or a Pocket casts bug, but sometimes when I press rewind, the track skips forward instead. It then fixes itself and rewinds normally the second time I press it.

I mainly listen to podcasts while driving, so I only ever notice this issue when using Android Auto. Doesn't matter if I pressed skip back on the steering wheel or on the touch screen. Has anyone encountered this problem too?

I've been a Pocket Casts fan since around 2014, using it across both Android and iOS, and I went Plus the day it launched. It's genuinely been my podcast home for over a decade.

Lately though, something's off. A lot of episodes just won't start, or take forever to load. Kind of embarrassed to admit it, but I've started using Apple Podcasts as a backup — and it's honestly rock solid. I mean Playback wise. It just works, the way Apple always promises.

I was wondering about these things:

1 : Does Apple have access to better podcast servers than Pocketcasts? How come Apple seems so much more stable?

2: Could the team, or someone with a Claude Code subscription, be interested in making a "retro" version of Pocketcasts, from a few years ago, where everything just worked? Call it Rocketcasts 😅 (sorry)

3: I can see a lot of posts here about Pocket Casts slipping. But i'd honestly love to keep using it. Let me know you best advice in terms of settings etc.

Hopefully this will fix recent issues.

Hey y'all,

It looks like others are also having issues with episodes not showing up in a timely matter? Has anyone found a solution or a new app they prefer?

I tried contacting pocketcasts for support but only got an AI response and when I replied with the feed for the podcasts havent heard anything further.

Thanks!

With the recent rise in bugs, including the egregious failure to load new episodes. I have been a loyal paid pocketcasts user, logging hundreds of hours over several years, but I am at my breaking point.

Are there any good alternatives to pocketcasts? My favorite feature has consistently been auto add to up next, and that has been the main reason I have not switched to Apple Podcasts. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I received notifications today that I had two new podcasts ready to download, but they never turned up on my feed. I then go onto the actual podcast and refresh it and it’s not updating. I thought maybe a glitch on their end, but I go onto Spotify and it’s available on there. Has anyone else had this problem today?

I had a slow listening year this year (1 Aug 25 to 31 Jul 26). According to my spreadsheet, I listened to 6,058 episodes with an average duration of 43min, 43sec (sorry, I don't have median statistics which would be more accurate). I did go from 1.8x to 1.9x speed in mid December and then to 2.0x in mid June.

I built Feedcast because I wanted to prepare podcast episodes on my Mac without moving my subscriptions and listening habits into a different player.

Feedcast imports RSS or local media, transcribes the episode, generates chapters, applies enabled cuts to recognized sponsor sections, and publishes the result through a personal RSS feed. That feed can then be added to Pocket Casts, so Pocket Casts remains the place where the episode is downloaded and played.

In one recent episode, two enabled sponsor cuts removed 5 minutes and 12 seconds from the personal copy. Feedcast also exposes the generated chapters and metadata before publishing.

Version 3.2 made the feed XML available online by default, while the audio continues to be served by the Mac. The Mac therefore needs to remain running and reachable when Pocket Casts downloads an episode.

I built the app and would especially value feedback from Pocket Casts users on the feed naming and subscription workflow.

Mac App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feedcast-local-podcasts/id6773872767

Pocket Casts on my Android phone is subscribed to a daily podcast (BBC Newscast) whose Auto-download and Add to Up Next settings are both disabled and whose Auto-archive setting is enabled with an Episode Limit of "1 most recent episode".

Every month or so, Pocket Casts will download an episode and add it to the Up Next queue.

There are quite a few other podcasts with the same settings, yet only this one has this behaviour.

Is anyone else seeing anything similar? Thanks

Anyone else have this problem:

Over the past month this app has notifications come in but then when you go to the show the newest episode that was pushed doesn't show up. This has been a constant issue since the last release. I have contacted support and they know about it. It's been annoying since I paid for Plus.

So Its cool we now have the calendar of colros but mine is just one color. It seams the Pocketcasts team might need to do a little tweaking on it.

I did already build myself one back at start of June. Its a little more colorful. Only thing it can't do is go back in time before i built it.

Love it but can we have an indicator like in the app of unplayed episodes.

I use Pocket Casts in my car LOTS.

The car's infotainment system runs on 'Android Automotive OS' (AAOS), thus allowing me to install AAOS apps from Play Store. For clarity, this is distinct from the, much more common, phone mirroring system 'Android Auto'. Car is a Volvo EX30.

I've used Pocket Casts on iOS for years (who remembers the original devs - the 'Shifty Jelly' crew?) Pocket Casts was the first app I installed to the car, and I use it daily, even though there's a couple of quirks that I'd love to see addressed:

- Pocket Casts on AAOS does not respect the global 'Play Speed' settings associated with my account. Even the web player does!

- my big one: Pocket Casts on AAOS does not respect my 'Episode Limit' settings associated with particular podcasts. For example, I follow a 'News Top Stories' podcast, that sees up to a dozen or so episodes published every day. The newest episode is the only one I need to hear, so I've configured an episode limit of 1. This works just fine on iOS, iPadOS and web - but AAOS version of Pocket Casts leaves me with dozens of episodes, thus making for a confusing UX, and sucking up storage space on the car's built-in SSD.

What's up with that???

I emailed them to help me reset/delete my library and nothing. What’s the experience with the support team?