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I regularly connect my iPhone 11 pro to my car via bluetooth to mostly play audio via Apple podcasts.

The screen in my car has a "libraries" pane, and on there is a section for podcasts, and that one contains the list of downloaded podcast episodes I have on my iPhone. That works quite nice; but after some time, things seem to "pile up".

What I mean is:

  • when I turn to "downloaded" page of the podcast app on my iPhone, I see one channel and two episodes
  • but when I turn to that pane in the car screen, it shows me 5, 8 different channels with episodes that I may have listened to two weeks ago, but that I have long deleted from phone.

I told the car to forget the iPhone, and then paired again; but that doesn't help: it still shows all the channels/episodes I have long since deleted. I am wondering if maybe the iPhone "keeps" such information somewhere?

Any suggestions what could be done here?

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The first thing to validate and re-establish is to organize the library on the phone. Second thing would be to understand if you are using CarPlay or the native iPod legacy play interface. They do behave differently in my experience.

I can't recall the default settings, but it should be a quick trip to the settings app to see if you have a preference to hide all played apps globally. Next up is to validate that the phone alone is working like you hope. Then go re-test in the car.

it still shows all the channels/episodes I have long since deleted

My hunch is either you didn't delete them, and instead they were hidden and somehow CarPlay is resurrecting them or you need to perform some arcane steps to re-exert control over the app. Hopefully, you don't have to visit each show, one by one to choose the "default" setting you prefer.


My opinion is that the native Podcast app and I just never got off on the right foot. I quickly decided that a third party app was well worth my money (to avoid the advertisements) and time (to learn and set up that app) and I've been delighted with it for quite some time. If you can't get help or make the app do what you want - check out a subscription and move a couple shows over to Overcast. See if it's your cup of tea.

The app has been free / ad-supported with a premium paid tier for a good long time, so maybe it's easy to try.

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  • Thank you very much I already checked most of these things, and that "re-exert control" feels way to burdensome. I have to admit that I find the Apple podcast thingy sufficient for myself (and I like the fact that I have the same app on my Mac, and can quickly identify episodes I already marked as listened). So ... maybe I will just have to live with this ;-)
    – GhostCat
    Commented Jan 24 at 11:30
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    Thanks for reading and the nice comment @GhostCat I wish I had better news than choose another app. Let’s hope someone else can confirm it’s working the same for them so you can decide to carry on knowing it’s not some setting you could fix easily.
    – bmike
    Commented Jan 24 at 13:01
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    You are welcome ... but I guess this is really a niche problem. But well, I identified one channel (probably the wrong word, not sure how to properly map the German "Sendung" to the correct terminology in English) that had an episode that was played half way in. I reset that episode, and I will check later today whether that makes it go away in the car display.
    – GhostCat
    Commented Jan 24 at 13:44
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    We love niche problems here on Ask Different. Sometimes answers don’t come for months or years, but everyone learns from them I find.
    – bmike
    Commented Jan 24 at 14:46

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