Thursday, May 6, 2021

Apple Podcasts Not Showing the Latest Podcasts

Jason Snell:

I’m getting a lot of tweets and emails saying the same thing: the latest episode of (some podcast I’m involved with) hasn’t shown up in Apple Podcasts.

Unfortunately, right now my only answer is to say, “It’s displaying properly in every other podcast app around, so if you’ve ever thought of using Overcast or Castro or Pocket Casts or any other alternative podcast app, now might be a good time to try.”

This is an issue on Apple’s side. Apple is aware of it and presumably is working on a fix.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I’m guessing the new Apple Podcasts now centralizes (& delays) refreshes of feeds, which is kinda frustrating if you want to listen to things the moment they are released. No amount of manual refreshing will convince Apple to reload the feed on the server

Josh Centers:

Apple recently overhauled the Podcasts app for the gazillionth time in iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and macOS 11.3 Big Sur, but unfortunately, it appears that Podcasts is still a hot mess.

[…]

I immediately noticed that I was already suffering from one of the complaints: Podcasts resetting your download settings and downloading every episode of every podcast you subscribe to or that has even a single episode in your library.

[…]

We’ve had Apple’s Podcasts app available on various platforms for nearly nine years now, but it has never been very good. After that amount of time, it’s hard to imagine that Apple will ever make it more than a lowest-common-denominator app for those who don’t know to find a better alternative in the App Store.

Unfortunately, users may not have much choice if Apple Podcasts Susbcriptions means that exclusive content ends up there.

Previously:

Update (2021-05-24): Marco Arment:

ATP disappeared from Apple Podcasts today, and I can’t log in to change it.

Whatever’s going on over there is definitely NOT resolved.

Justin Jackson:

I’ve been tracking all of the issues related to this rollout here.

5 Comments RSS · Twitter

The halcyon days of iTunes pre-version 9 and iOS pre-version 6 when iTunes was a flawless podcatcher, with disclosure triangle classic list view so every time the podcast changed feed, it remained a single entry in iTunes, and then iOS having Podcasts as just a section in the iPod app.

Everything worked, flawlessly. Download to computer, sync to phone, sync back, playpoints, files, everything was rock-solid and reliable.

Then iTunes (I think) 10 introduced a bunch of new things, like default auto-deleting of episodes, with no way to auto-save, that stupid iOS-style 3 column view, where every time a show changes feed, a new entry for the show is created, and iCloud-based syncing with an iOS app that never worked properly, that keeps pushing streaming and on-device subscriptions to the top, and dark-patterning the UX for just playing files that are on device.

Ignominious end to a format, that's now just more meat for the machine of Apple's "use content to sell hardware" business plan.

The Apple podcast app has been terrible since they made it into its own app. I've tried multiple 3rd party podcast apps over the years and Pocket Casts has been my favorite. One of the nice things is that it syncs beautifully over multiple devices whether I'm working on my PC or going for a walk listening to my iPhone. The Apple Podcast app has always had syncing issues and it still baffles me that they haven't managed to solve it yet.

I knew this was coming. Beta 3 of 14.5 changed it this way. I hated it and switched to Pocketcasts which is worlds better. I submitted feedback but of course it went into a black hole.

After years of fighting with small bugs and annoyances with the Podcasts.app the recent upgrade finally made me switch to Overcast. Once I'm sure everything works fine I will buy the pro upgrade to support the developer.

After Mail.app this is the second stock app I had to ditch because of software quality. It's sad on the one hand, but I'm happy for the independent devs who are able to fill the void.

I'm worried about other stock apps which are not as easily replaceable like Photos.app though. Already had data loss type bugs in Photos twice. Fortunately was able to recover the lost photos from backups. But my confidence in this piece of software is very low now. Would switch, but it's not as easy to find a replacement which can sync offline with the iPhone.

[…] no ha tardado en llegar el fatal desenlace en el que una actualización transforma una app sencilla y útil en una basura que solamente […]

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