downloaded podcasts disappear from my iPhone 10

This continues to be frustrating. For me it started immediately after I updated from iOS 15 to iOS 16; is everyone else with this problem on iOS 16? Is anyone having this problem on iOS 17 (or iOS 15)?

Hey there philaltimas,

We'd like to help by learning more about what's happening, along with ruling out some possible causes:

1. You mentioned this began in the last three weeks, but do you recall what you were doing on your iPhone right before this began to occur?
2. A full, or nearly full internal storage could cause unexpected behavior like this to occur. How much available built-in storage do you have under Settings > General > iPhone Storage?
3. Since you have a compatible iPhone model, the latest version is iOS 16.4.1(a). You can verify this within Settings > General > About. In case you needed it, this link shows how to first back up, then Update your iPhone or iPad.

Cheers!

I don’t know but strongly suspect that this phenomenon of downloaded podcasts disappearance has to do with ad-serving. Because programmatic ad servers target you depending on where you are and what network was used to serve the podcast, when you change location, the ad Server wants you to hear different ads on the podcast and so needs you to download it fresh again so it can get those ads onto your feed. My podcasts always disappear when I fly between countries and connect to new networks.

Same here!!! Exactly as described above!! Please help

Hello philaltimas,

Is this happening when more the 24 hours have passed? If so, it's most likely related to "Remove Played Downloads". You can check by going to Settings > Podcast. If Remove Played Downloads is enabled, disable it and see if the issue continues.

Thanks.

Hello. I am having the exact same issue. New podcasts I download are not saving in the app; the ‘Downloads’ section only shows one particular download from two weeks ago as the most recent, and ends there. Only some shows I manually download are saving. Anything automatic is not there. My storage is only half full, more than sufficient. I have ‘remove played downloads’ turned on, but am shutting it off for now. And I did not accept the new suggestion that’s been popping up - ‘Remove older downloads, only save the 5 most recent ones, etc’. Any suggestions?

Exactly the same problem (and more) for me, and it started as soon as I updated to iOS 16 two weeks ago. Prior to that I was on iOS 15 with no issues. I've even had podcasts auto-delete as I was playing them - initially I'm playing the downloaded version, and "Remove download" is an option, and within a minute or two I'm apparently streaming the podcast because that "Remove" option has been replaced with "Download podcast". I select that, and it downloads, then the next time I look it's once again been deleted even though it the podcast currently playing.

I definitely do not have storage optimization enabled - I prefer to handle all that myself - and it's a 256GB iPhone with 176GB available. And "Remove Played Downloads" has never been enabled, which shouldn't be affecting podcasts that have never been played, which are magically auto-deleting.

Possibly related: I first noticed something was wonky because I've always downloaded podcasts to my Mac and then synced them via USB, but as soon as I updated the phone to iOS 16 some of my podcasts refused to sync, even though the checkbox has been ticked to sync. Some do sync, but some simply don't without any kind of error message - they just don't show up on the phone (or maybe they do sync and are instantly auto-deleted; hard to know). I tried a number of things to fix this behavior - unsyncing and resyncing the particular podcasts, same thing with all podcasts of a particular show, restarting both the Mac and iPhone - all to no avail. At that point I gave up and simply downloaded directly to my iPhone, and found that once downloaded the same podcasts will auto-delete within a few minutes, even though they're marked "Saved" (both on the Mac and on the iPhone).

I looked into my data usage with my carrier, and even though this only started two weeks ago, I've already used more cellular data than I normally do by this time of the month, presumably because podcasts are streaming while I'm out and about rather than playing from copies downloaded over WiFi. So it's not just annoying, it may wind up costing money.

Sschelin, on my iPad & from a bottom up perspective, the podcast app comes and goes in my settings menu when I turn Safari cookie settings on off. This behavior corresponds with the original ios changes (back to 16?). Used to happen on my older iPhone as well. It hasn't reared itself on my new phone.

Hey there philaltimas,

Do you happen to have storage optimization enabled?

How to check the storage on your iPhone and iPad - Apple Support

Kind regards.