iPhone 13 ios 26 podcasts randomly deleting

I have an iPhone 13 running that I’ve been using as if it was an iPod, so I download podcasts direct from Apple Podcasts onto the device but I’m experiencing a major glitch since updating to IOS 26. Basically, the podcast app randomly deletes hundreds of unplayed episodes for multiple podcasts randomly. It happened once, then I manually downloaded all the deleted episodes again, but this morning I woke up to find it has happened again, so now I feel like I can’t trust the device anymore.

Some more details:

• Typically, for each podcast show, all episodes will be deleted except for 1 - the oldest episode previously downloaded.
• I noticed the random deletions are less likely to happen if I’m following a show. Some shows are untouched, but others lose some episodes.
• But for shows that I’m not following and where I was manually downloading episodes, all of those episodes have been deleted… except for the oldest one for each show.
• Just to reiterate, these are unplayed episodes and still show up that way on the Apple Podcasts feeds, so it’s not that they’re mistakenly showing up as being played on my device and being deleted on that basis.

Anyone experiencing similar issues? Any fix?

Thanks in advance!