A new Apple Podcasts bug means listeners miss the latest episodes of their shows [update: fixed]

Update: The issue now appears to have been resolved and episodes are rolling out as intended once more. Original story below.

An Apple Podcasts bug is making listeners miss the newest released episodes of their favorite shows. Seemingly impacting some significant proportion of shows that released new episodes yesterday, the bug means that the Apple Podcasts app does not show the latest episode in the user’s library, nor will it automatically download it and appear in the Up Next queue.

There is a workaround that entails manually finding the exact episode in the search tab, but that requires the user to be aware that a new episode has been released in the first place …

The hero image is an example of what happens. As you can see from the left screenshot, the episode list for ‘The Ankler’ podcast does not include the published 16 February episode. Refreshing the screen makes no difference. The Apple Podcasts app library is blissfully unaware of its existence.

It’s unclear exactly how many shows it affects, but it appears to be a significant number, with a littering of complaints on social media. Personally, the bug afflicted at least two of the shows I subscribe to; I realized this morning that the new Friday episodes from both shows were not appearing in the app.

This appears to be an issue with the Apple Podcasts backend, and hopefully Apple can deploy a server fix that will transparently resolve the problems.

For the time being, the workaround is to manually search the name of the podcast in question in the Search tab, using the Episodes filter toggle. You can then scroll down the results and find the new episode (as shown in the rightmost screenshot above). You can press Play from here and it will update your library listings and Up Next queue, as you would normally expect.

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