What's new in Podtastic — August 1, 2026
Short one this week. No big-feature launch — just a lot of quiet work on things you'd never see unless they were broken. Which is my favourite kind of week.
Jump to Video is open to everyone (opt-in)
Jump to Video was our biggest test-audience feature this year. It lets you hop from a video podcast's audio feed to the YouTube version of the same episode, starting a few seconds before where you were, so you don't have to hunt for your spot. Same the other way — tap back to audio and it resumes just before the last thing you heard.
It's been running with a small opt-in audience for the last couple of months. This week we opened it to every user. Still opt-in — turn it on in Settings → Experimental Features if you want it. Off by default.
You can sign in with Google to use your YouTube Premium if you have it, so ads don't come back on the video side. The jump itself is snappier too — a smaller automatic rewind, and the video starts with sound so it's one tap instead of two.
Downloads survive bad signal (iOS)
If your signal drops mid-download, the download used to restart from zero. It doesn't anymore — it picks up from where it stopped.
Long car journeys, tube stations, the kitchen dead zone. All better.
Faster app launch on large libraries (iOS)
If you subscribe to a lot of shows, the app used to take a couple of seconds to become responsive at launch while it did some housekeeping in the background. On the slowest devices it could freeze for long enough to be a problem.
That's gone. Launch is snappy again regardless of library size.
The Playlists tab is one continuous list
The Playlists tab used to have a "Your Playlists" header sitting above the built-in Unplayed, In Progress, and Downloaded rows. It read as saying the built-ins were a lesser class of thing.
Dropped the header. Everything sits at the same level now. iOS matches Android, which never had it.
Rewind button fix (Android)
Reported by John Weller on a Galaxy Z Fold: on Android, the mini-player's rewind button was actually skipping forward. Full-screen player was fine — only the mini-player was broken.
Fixed. Both buttons now go the direction they say they go.
Tap a skip banner to see what got skipped
When Podtastic skips past an interruption, a banner briefly appears at the top of the player. It used to be information-only. Now tapping it opens the transcript at exactly where we jumped from, so you can see what was there and decide for yourself whether we should've. Shipped on iOS and Android.
If we ever get a skip wrong, this is how to tell us — the banner is one tap from a report action.
Small polish
- The pull handle at the top of the full-screen player now follows your finger as you swipe down instead of staying pinned. Small thing, felt wrong. Fixed on iOS.
- If you're a subscriber, no more brief "not subscribed" flash at launch on a bad connection. We check locally first now.
That's it for this week. Rewind bug fixed, downloads survive bad signal, launch snappy on big libraries, Jump to Video open to all. Small things, added up.
Thanks for using the app.
— Ben
