[hnzix]

Trying to setup chronological podcast playback on the Apple Podcast is horrible, and they are constantly fiddling with the terrible UI. I just want to binge 5 consecutive episodes of a history podcast, but everything in the UI tries to funnel you into listening to the latest episode of multiple podcasts.

[mbreese]

Funny thing - this works very well, so long as you don’t use the UI. At least, it has recently, I do t know if things changed.

I was listening to a history podcast (British History podcast), which has been going on for years. I listen while running, so it’s managed on my phone. For a while, I would occasionally get the app trying to skip ahead, but only if it had issues downloading the next episode (again, I was out running).

I eventually just downloaded batches of 10-20 episodes and everything worked perfectly in chronological order. And more recently, it all “just worked” even while new episodes were released. My guess is that some behavior recently changed, but I can’t confirm it.

So, I think the UX goal is to try to get you some content of it has issues with the next chronological episode.

[mr_toad]

It also seems to be impossible to get it to automatically download episodes in chronological order. It only wants to download new episodes. So if you run out of downloaded episodes it will skip forward to the new episodes, which could be years apart.