Podcasts won’t delete automatically after 24 hours on my iPhone 13

Same here. Wondering why more people are not complaining about this issue. It’s a (pain) to have to remove played podcasts manually. Something Apple should look into.

I'm having this issue as well on my iPhone 16 Pro

Same! And also for the love of Jobs, I wish they gave us a way to remove ‘Documents & Data’ in the Podcast app. There is absolutely no reason my Podcast app should be using 11 GB of space on my phone when there’s no episodes downloaded. Why have they never given us a way to get rid of that without deleting and reinstalling the app?!?!

This is my issue as well. I must manually remove played podcasts. Please advise.

thanks.

I have the same issue on my iPhone 16 running 18.5

ReoExpress wrote:

1) Wondering why more people are not complaining about this issue.

2) It’s a (pain) to have to remove played podcasts manually.

1) Fwiw, I use the app daily but only just noticed. And, for me, it’s not only played episodes that aren’t automatically deleting. The Automatically Download feature isn’t cleaning up after itself either. (iPhone SE 2nd Gen)

2) Agreed. I decided to go nuclear. ☢️

For now, I’ll redownload what I need as I add to my queue.

Relevant Aside: Doesn’t seem to have resolved with 18.5.

Same here, a nightmare to manage, Podcast app space keeps growing if we don't delete podcast manually.

Switching to Spotify ...

I have had to manually remove played episode downloads every few days since the app no longer does it automatically.

Too much work and I have given up on the Apple Podcasts app. It seems that with every iteration it “takes on step forward and two steps back.”

I have gone back to Pocket Casts podcast player as it seems the apple app is broken.

Same here! It’s rather ridiculous

tattucci wrote:

And also for the love of Jobs, I wish they gave us a way to remove ‘Documents & Data’ in the Podcast app. There is absolutely no reason my Podcast app should be using 11 GB of space on my phone when there’s no episodes downloaded. Why have they never given us a way to get rid of that without deleting and reinstalling the app?!?!

At the risk of stating the obvious, that seems really high for residual usage data. Are you sure you don’t have a bunch of saved and/or manually downloaded podcasts? There’s an easy way to check… Under the Library tab, there’s a filter for both categories.

Same issue on my new iPhone 16 256GB.

On my 12 mini 128GB I don't have had this problem, both on iOS 18.4.1.