Contact Apple Podcasts Support

I used to use this app every single day to listen to hours of my backlog of my favorite podcasts, then Apple suddenly switched directions and completely removed the ability for users to load and store old episodes of podcasts and manage them as they like. I spent countless hours trying to find a hidden feature to do what used to simply be the natural function of the app, when it was built into iTunes, but to no avail. My huge library of podcast content was simply lost to me. It was first scrambled by the broken Podcast app for macOS, so I could no longer access the files directly, then this app failed to support playback of the files I did have. Archives of older episodes are often very difficult to come by, as many providers truncate the older files, or creators switch services and don’t bring their older episodes over to the new service. My years-old collection was lost. I ended up scouring the Internet to gather up as many of the raw MP3 files as I could find, and am awaiting someone to give me a way to organize and listen to them. Finally, recently, I discovered that iMazing may be a solution to load podcasts directly into this app manually, but my first attempt got some into my library, then they disappeared after I synced my phone again. I just don’t understand they need to remove a core functionality from one of their apps that is used by so many people. :(

How can Apple, on of the first companies to realize how important user interface is, make such a convoluted and confusing app. Is there really no way to auto play a season from beginning to end? Unless a que up the next episode when I finish an episodes the podcast app doesn’t play anything or starts the newest episode from a podcast I haven’t listened to in over a year. There isn’t even a “recently listed to” menu. I have to search for it every time and figure out what episode I’m on. It has also stopped keeping track of what episodes I have already played. So I put a bunch of episodes in que, this afternoon they dispersed and it started playing a podcast I subscribe to but don’t listen too. I suspect subscribing to the new podcast I want to listen to would fix some of this, but at least auto play the next episode of the podcast I’m whether I am subscribed to or not. I listen while working and sometimes I want to try a podcast before subscribing… I can’t be stopping every half hour to find the next episode if I forgot to air on up. Anyways, this app lacks a intuitive interface and takes to much effort to figure out. I will find another place to listen to podcasts… just hard to believe the company that made podcasts a thing can’t make a worthwhile app for them.

I listen to between 10 and 15 podcasts every week on a regular basis. In recent weeks I have noticed that even though I add podcasts to my queue it is constantly reverting back and playing episodes that I have either previously listened to or have even deleted because I wasn’t interested in that one. They do not play in any sort of logical order so I will often find a podcast that’s several days old that has been skipped over if I’m not paying attention. It has also dropped extremely old episodes into the Up Next section because I’m currently subscribed to that podcast. I don’t understand what is so difficult about providing an app that plays the specific podcasts that you subscribe to in the order that they are received and to be able to re-order those easily if desired. Perhaps it’s Apple’s desire to have you “explore” more podcasts, and so they make it much more difficult to listen to the ones that you already subscribe to and throw in other random episodes that you have not asked for. If I wanted to find other podcasts and add more to my collection, I would go to the explore page, but I do not. Generally I’m a fan of Apple products, but the podcast app has become very frustrating of late.