It’s hard to argue against the the popularity of podcasts these days. There are scores of people from all walks of life that have made their presence felt by branching into the podcasting world. With so many people making podcasts there is a podcast for everyone, available on a variety of platforms. My platform of choice happens to be Apple’s Podcasts app.
The Podcasts app is preinstalled in every Apple device now that they expanded its availability to desktops and laptops running newer versions of the MacOS. This doesn’t mean that you can’t go ahead and use a different podcast app such as Spotify on their devices, but personally I have dug my roots deep in the Podcasts ecosystem. Which is basically a way of saying that I’m too lazy to look up my shows on another platform.
I can’t remember exactly when I started listening to podcasts but it must be over 5 years by now. Since then, my library of shows has expanded many times and contracted very little and currently contains 21 shows. Of These, about half of them I actively listen to while the other half collects dust until I see an episode that might be interesting.
For over 5 years, my settings for the app haven’t changed as much as my phones have. Now, on an iPhone X with 256GB, I try to be memory conscious deleting unnecessary data and backing up as frequently as possible. I know having 256GB is a lot of memory but the routine is necessary and worthwhile.
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While checking in on my local phone storage one day, I was blown away with the amount of data being used by my podcasts. I thought my pictures and videos would be the main culprit, but they only took up an insignificant amount of 5 GB. The podcasts stored nearly 40GB of data to the phone!
The fact that I had let it get to this point is quite embarrassing and the process of getting rid of all this data just rubbed salt in the wound. Not only did I have to delete each entry of data individually, there were multiple saves from the same show. This was the last time I would let this happen.
After a painful amount of time deleting all the data, I immediately navigated my way towards the Podcasts section in the settings app to make some permanent changes. In there I found a section specifically related to episode downloads where I made changes to the “Download Episodes” portion to Off. This gives me the ability to save episodes that I would like to save for future reference directly in the app.
For extra precaution, I also turned on “Block Downloads Over Cellular” and kept “Delete Played Episodes” on as well. And that’s when I saw the fine print that said “Episodes can be automatically deleted after they’re played.” After many moons of letting the podcasts build up in my queue, they were also piling up in my storage without supervision.
So for those out there who enjoy listening to podcasts, just make sure you’re only saving the episodes you like.
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