Pocketcasts on Android Automotive (AAOS) does not sync reliably.
-
To be honest. I gave up on this to work. I had it working a while then it stopped again for no reason and with the latest version it always tried to sync before it had a 4g LTE connection so there was a error and you had to stop the car and manually sync for it to sync. As your°te not allowed to sync while driving. If you didn’t do that it would eventually try to sync and end up in the beginning of the podcast most of the times.
-
@jampeuppgard Thanks for sharing those details. I’ve passed this update on to our engineers.
-
I see you are now heavily pushing paying for the app subscription in-app. Until this bug is fixed, I’m definitely not going to pay a monthly fee. But, if I can reliably use this in my car, I may very well be willing to pay for this app, as I still use it heavily.
-
hey.
So now I’m back to using this on AAos version again since my xc40 got the new ux update , which fixes most of what I had a problem with, as to why was I was using Android auto. To my surprise the syncing on pocketcasts still doesn’t work. Is this not going to be fixed?. The manual syncing is not reliable when first of all the car needs to stand still to be used and almost every time it does not sync to where I actually left on my phone. Most of the time it’s just ends up att the start of a episode.
-
Yeah, I’ve been using AAOS more after the most recent Volvo update, but Pocketcasts is still basically unusable with the lack of syncing. It’s too bad the AAOS version seems to be abandoned. I would love to use it.
-
Hi!
I also have a Volvo (EX40) and I’m an habitual Pocket Casts user while driving.Noticed a bunch of bugs on the UI/UX side (for which I’ll open a new thread), but this one about syncing (or not always syncing) is definitely the most annoying!
I can confirm too that the reason seems to be the start of the sync while still without a connection and not re-trying again automatically after failing.
Let me know if I can help with logs or something.
-
Thank you for your feedback about this issue. The Android Automotive app currently does not sync progress automatically in the background. The workaround for now is to manually trigger a sync before playback starts:
- Open Pocket Casts on your AAOS display.
- Go to Settings within the app.
- Tap Refresh Now to force a sync before hitting play.
This should pull in your latest position and current episode from your phone. We know this is not ideal, and the team is working on implementing proper background refresh for AAOS to make this seamless.
If the “Refresh Now” workaround does not work reliably for you, it would be great to hear more:
- Which version of the Pocket Casts AAOS app are you running? (visible in Settings)
- Does the refresh ever succeed, or does the spinner persist indefinitely?
Thanks again for the feedback – reports like this help us prioritize the fix.
-
It’s amazing to me that as many people that have stated the same issue and even have thorough enough to figure out what the actual issue is that the problem isn’t able to be recreated by anyone from PocketCasts.
-
“Refresh now” generally works, but since it’s locked while the car is moving, it’s not very useful. I’m not going to wait for Pocketcasts to load, fail to sync, and then tell it to refresh again before I start driving. If you didn’t lock refresh while driving, that would help a bit anyway.
-
Regarding:
It’s amazing to me that as many people that have stated the same issue and even have thorough enough to figure out what the actual issue is that the problem isn’t able to be recreated by anyone from PocketCasts.
Our team is aware of the issue, and we acknowledged it on https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/known-issues/
The workaround is to use the ‘Refresh Now’ button, but we do understand it is not ideal and hope to have some improvements released soon.
-
the refresh now does not work at all since xc40 software update to android 13 with v5.0.5. with pocketcast 8.9 rc2a.
playing something on phone the going into the car, Waiting for the auto update to fail as LTE takes a few seconds to start, pushing refresh now does nothing. It just says update complete and it’s still on where it was last time played in the car. So have ro check phone where I left off then manually move the slider to correct timing and start playing. This is 100% of the time now. Last year the refresh now actually worked sometimes…
Pocket Casts Forum 