Playback skips backwards randomly
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@gilescolclough Thanks for your report. Since you’re still on iOS 17.6.1, would it be possible for you to upgrade to 17.7.2 or the newer iOS 18?
@shadowm81 Can you please confirm if you’re also on the iOS app? Would you mind letting us know the make and model of your device, along with OS version? Thank you!
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Yes I’m on IOS App. I have iPhone 15 Pro Max with 18.1.1. Pocket Casts version 7.76.1. The problem still remain.
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I recently got a Pixel 9 Pro that’s running Android 15, and I was hoping that might solve the Pocket Casts skipping problem, but no such luck– same as before. As others have reported, it typically happens with podcasts that have dynamic ad placement. Today’s example: Billion Dollar Record Club, which (when I first played it) skipped ~30 seconds around the 4:20 mark, with about 1 minute of ads at the beginning. I dowloaded the episode, and that version had 30 seconds of ads with no skipped audio.
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@bgzimmer @shadowm81 thank you for sharing those details with us! I’ve forwarded this along to our developers, which will help them when investigating and working on this issue.
In the meantime, you may want to consider downloading episodes before playback, which many users have found to prevent the skipping from occurring.
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it is almost 2025. How is this STILL a problem? Are you guys working on this at all or are you just like “screw it everyone. We can’t be bothered. Just live will all your podcasts randomly skipping around in time because dynamic ads are the only thing we care about”?
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@mikerockwell sorry man but advising us to simply download every episode is NOT an acceptable fix. Come on man, you guys have known about this issue since at least 2023, and have claimed you are working on a fix for over a year. It shouldn’t take a year (or forever) to fix this. You know what’s causing the problem and have for a very long time. It’s the dynamic ads. Either figure out how to make your app play nice with them, or disable them.
expecting us to just live with it is not okay
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@nwhdkk6b7t I suspect there may be a miscommunication on dynamic ad insertion in podcasts. This isn’t something that we’ve implemented in Pocket Casts at all. This is a technology that individual podcast creators choose to use within their own podcasts.
They manage this feature alongside their host and/or the dynamic ad insertion partner that they’ve chosen to work with. It isn’t something that we at Pocket Casts have any control over and aren’t able to disable it — the ads are dynamically added to the file at the time of download by the host/ad company that the podcast creator uses.
Since these types of ads can vary in length — including instances where they aren’t added at all — it makes streaming episodes and maintaining a consistent playback duration tricky. This can also be exacerbated by inconsistent network access and other factors.
Our developers have made updates to the app over the past few months, including making changes to the way that episode files are stored/cached when streamed to help address these types of issues, however, we haven’t been able to nail down every scenario that these dynamic ads could potential cause skipping issues.
I’m not able to provide an estimated timeframe, but I can assure you that fixing skipping during playback is a high priority for our developers and we’re doing all that we can to try an resolve it as soon as possible.
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it’s good to hear that you are still trying to fix this, and I definitely misunderstood how the dynamic ads are placed, but that said, I can confirm that it is still very much an issue. And it’s still happening frequently. In the last 7 days I’ve listened to quite a few different podcasts (for example “Guide To The Unknown”, “Disgraceland”, “Mr Ballen”, “Forensic Files”, “Strange and Unexplained”, “The Horror Show”, “Spooked”, “Cold Case Files”, “Small Town Murder”, “Halloween Is Forever”, “48 Hours”, “American Hysteria”… as well as at least a few more I’m forgetting) and most if not all of them have had this issue. The “Disgraceland” episode about Bill Murray was so bad that I had to listen to it on Apple Podcasts instead because in one part it leapt like 4 minutes ahead, and then never went back. “Guide to the Unknown” also seems to have multiple skips per episode, though like I mentioned, they pretty much all seem to do it, although generally it’s a leap backwards instead of forwards, so at least you can just forward back to the part you missed. When it leaps forward you just miss that part entirely
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@nwhdkk6b7t thanks for sharing all of this with us. I can imagine how frustrating this must be.
Reports of these issues have decreased since we’ve made changes to our app, described by my colleague earlier. We definitely would need to take a closer look here.
To help us debug this further, please let us know:
- Do you get the same issue when you download the episodes before streaming them?
- What version of Pocket Casts are you using, and on what device, OS, etc?
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TL;DR: Implement two small new features :
- Automatic download of an episode when you press play
- A button to clear the audio cache of an episode
Your current suggestion to “download episodes before playback” is problematic because that means either setting Pocket Casts to download every new episode of a podcast when it’s released, which we may not want, or to perform a manual action before listening to an episode. (A manual action not available in the Android Auto UI, BTW.)
Why don’t you just implement a new setting to download an entire episode in one chunk when playback starts? Preferably one that can be a per-podcast setting. This seems incredibly simple, would give us a pretty transparent workaround, and seems like a useful feature anyway.
I’m sure there are situations where that’s still not good enough and you should definitely continue to try and fix the problem, but you already have code to download episodes and play from those downloads, and you already have per-podcast features. You don’t even really have to wait for the download, because it’s the same data that you would have been “streaming”. (Admittedly, that might be something that requires actual development time, but it doesn’t seem hard.)
The other problem with the current situation is that once Pocket Casts has streamed this mismatched audio data, there’s no readily available way to just clear the cache. It does seem possible, but it’s annoying and awkward and, in my experience, inconsistent. The thing that works for me most of the time is starting playback of another episode, force-quitting the app, then starting playback of the bad episode again. But this is honestly ridiculous, and still sometimes doesn’t work. There should just be a “clear audio cache” button somewhere. At least if we do encounter the problem, we can sigh, press the button, and just skip back to where we were.
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It still happens to me all the time.
When you say you implemented a way to cache audio, I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about my suggestion for download-on-play, or are you talking about the cache I complained about in the last comment? If the former, I don’t see that option anywhere; can you tell me how? If the latter … yes, that’s what I’m complaining about; there’s no way to invalidate the cache when it’s downloaded the wrong thing.
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Hi @wfaulk,
To be clear, we’ve made changes to how episode files are stored and cached when streamed, which has helped reduce skipping reports overall. This is not the “download-on-play” feature you suggested (though we appreciate that suggestion and it’s something we’ve considered). It’s also separate from the cache you mentioned that sometimes downloads the wrong thing. The caching improvements we’ve made are designed to make streaming more reliable, but as you and others have experienced, they haven’t completely eliminated all skipping issues.
We realize that simply improving the general caching mechanism hasn’t solved the problem for everyone, and we’re actively working to pinpoint the remaining causes of skipping. Dynamic ads, as you may know, can introduce complexities to the streaming process, and they are a likely culprit in many of the remaining cases.
While we can’t provide a specific timeline for a complete fix, we want to assure you that resolving playback skipping is a top priority for our developers.
In the meantime, one thing you can try is clearing the app cache. Here’s how:
- Go to your device’s Settings.
- Find and select the Pocket Casts app in the list of apps.
- Tap on Storage or Cache.
- Tap on Clear Cache.
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Any news?? The problem is still here.. I don’t understand.. why, for example, Spotify doesn’t have this problem on podcast? If I hear the same podcast on Spotify, the problem doesn’t exist. Why? Please solve this problem, there are a lot of gold user that pay you for this app, and this issue is ridicoulus.
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Hi @shadowm81
Thanks for following up — we understand how frustrating this is. While apps like Spotify and Pocket Casts both play podcasts, they use very different technology behind the scenes, so it’s not unusual to see different behavior and issues across different audio apps.
At the moment, we don’t have any new updates to share, as we have struggled to identify a specific cause, but we agree this issue deserves deeper investigation. It’s on our radar, and we’re planning to look into it more thoroughly. We really appreciate your patience and support.
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Sorry, you said that solving the problem is a priority and we’ve been stuck since February? Do you have any idea that people pay for Pocket Casts? Other platforms don’t have the same problem. You’ve had a thousand suggestions and you haven’t tried a single one. I don’t think that’s a fair attitude towards your users.
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@shadowm81 I can assure you that our developers are hard at work trying to find a solution for this. In fact, they have been constantly been releasing updates, some of which resolved most of the issues (you may have noticed the reports on this thread and GitHub have reduced significantly).
We are aware that many users are still facing these issues and the investigation is ongoing to determine why some are still experiencing the issue.
Other platforms don’t have the same problem.
Since we at Pocket Casts do not host episodes and rely on the URL in the RSS Feed, this kind of situation can occur. We also do not insert ads into podcasts, any ads you hear are from the author themselves. This is why our platform is different from others.
The best workaround till we have this fixed is to download episodes from the affected podcasts. This will ensure the ads inserted by the author do not change when they are using dynamic ad insertion.
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@shadowm81 we made some additional improvements 3 weeks ago for our iOS app. On Android, our last report was made last year.
If the issues persist, please ensure you are using the latest version of Pocket Casts and share any additional information that can help us with our investigation, such as:
- Platform used (iOS or Android)
- Podcasts affected
- How often does it occur, and how long are the episode durations generally when this occurs?
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Honestly, it seems like a joke to me. After all this time, the situation is still not resolved. Do you have any idea that there are users who have paid and are paying for this product? And what do you do? You don’t listen to the users at all. It’s embarrassing. I will definitely change the application.
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