Ever since I updated to iOS25 beta 4, my dowloaded podcast episodes all get deleted from my device. I made sure to turn off the "Remove Played Downloads" on all my shows, but even unplayed episodes are deleted every day.
Is this a known bug?
iPhone SE, iOS 26
This is happening in the official iOS26 release too (running on iPhone 13).
This bug was resolved a few years ago, but seems to have returned in this version.
Interestingly this only seems to happen with the same few podcasts out of the many I'm following, but I can't find a common thread between them. They're all subscribed via Apple Podcasts directly, and not RSS feeds.
It is reproducible (and very annoying) though.
I’m experiencing something very similar if not identical with my iPhone 13. What I’ve noticed is that if I download episodes of a particular podcast manually, when the random mass deletion kicks in I’ll lose every downloaded episode, but for some shows it’ll keep one episode - the oldest. But for shows I actively Follow, some will be untouched by the cull and others will lose some episodes but not others, so if I had 50 episodes, maybe 30 might survive. This has happened twice this week, so now I feel like I can’t trust the device anymore.
This is exactly what happened to me, ever since iOS26 I had 200+ episodes of my favourite podcast, but everyday it deletes them so I only have 89 episodes left. I download them again. But next day - gone. Never had this issue with any previous iOS
That is also my experience. At least I know I am not alone now.
I have tried using the Save feature to see if it would help retain my downloads. It didn’t really help so far.
Podcast Episodes Deleted Despite "Remove Played Downloads" Turned Off
