Bug? Podcast app marking new downloads as Played

I’m seeing the same bug. Episodes marked as played before being played and removed from my “Up Next” queue causing me to miss new episodes. It’s dropping episodes into the player and marking them played automatically. Very frustrating. The podcast app is also continuously playing another episode even though I have that option turned off. I’ve toggled the option several times, still broken. I’ve even uninstalled the app and reinstalled it, no luck. These bugs are on my iPhone and iPad running 18. Definitely bugs. Definitely annoying. I don’t run the public betas because of issues like this but here we are on a final release with major bugs in the Podcast app. 🙁👎🏼

I’m seeing this too. Also seems to happen when I choose to listen to something else instead of what the app puts next in the queue.

thought I was going mad at first but happened with three different podcasts now.

I’m seeing this, too. It is VERY frustrating when it marks one of my episodes as played even though I didn’t listen to it. I also noticed that it puts a bunch of episodes I’m the queue when this happens.

I've observed the same behavior. It's been going on for some time, but now it's getting worse: (i) new podcast episodes get downloaded and show up in 'Latest Episodes' for some time, but then disappear; this has happened with certain shows for quite some time, but now it's spreading. (ii) After playback of an episode has finished, it will automatically play some other episode, and I can't figure out how to stop it from doing that; this also has happened before on a much smaller scale, but now it's spreading.

Glad to see I'm not alone in this, ever since updating to ios 18 this keeps happening and it's so frustrating. I keep making sure "Continuous Playback" is off but it keeps just randomly adding a bunch of things to my queue and auto playing the next episode and then if you go out of order it seems to randomly marking things as played even though you don't actually start them. It's definitely frustrating because now I keep missing new episodes of different podcasts.

I noticed that this happens when an episode ends. The next podcast from Up Next will load in player, but is immediately marked as played. If continuous playback is on or you hit play right away, it will play, but it will already be marked as played.

Fixed in iOS 18.1 according to Mac Rumors.

"iOS 18.1 also fixes several other bugs, including a Podcasts issue that could cause unplayed episodes to be marked as played"