What's New in Podtastic — March 27, 2026

This week brought a major performance fix for iOS users, smarter topic navigation, and several quality-of-life improvements. If your library felt sluggish before, you'll notice the difference immediately.

Your library just got a lot faster

iOS users with large podcast libraries were experiencing occasional freezes and hangs when scrolling through their shows. We traced this to background work happening on the main thread, blocking the interface while it ran.

That's fixed now. Library stats update in the background, download progress refreshes at a sensible pace instead of flooding the screen, and podcast rows render without triggering unnecessary recalculations. If you subscribe to a lot of shows, browsing should feel noticeably snappier.

Smart Topics now handle mid-conversation ad breaks

Previously, if an ad break interrupted a topic mid-sentence, the topic timeline could jump to the next section after the break ended. Now Podtastic recognizes when a topic was still in progress before the ad and continues it on the other side.

On the lock screen, skip controls now show clean forward/back arrows instead of "Forward 15" labels. They'll jump between topics when available, and fall back to 15-second skips when there are no chapters.

Audio stays paused during phone calls

A subtle bug caused podcasts to resume about a second into a phone call. The app was checking whether other audio was playing to detect when Siri finished, but phone calls don't register as "other audio." We added proper call detection so your podcast stays paused from the moment a call starts until it ends.

Smaller fixes

Episodes now refresh properly after logging in on iOS (previously required restarting the app)
The player scrubber responds more reliably during seeks, with no more frozen sliders
Skip icons in the Android mini and full player now show the correct direction
Playing an unprocessed episode now shows a heads-up explaining that Smart features aren't available yet
The welcome flow has been restructured to better explain how Pod-telligence works

What's coming next

We're working on improvements to how episodes are marked as played near their end, and fixing a queue behavior where playback could get stuck after returning from the background. More on those soon.

Skip ads automatically with Podtastic

Want to try these improvements yourself? Podtastic is a fully featured podcast player for iOS and Android with built-in ad skipping. You'll get:

Automatic ad skipping powered by AI — no manual fast-forwarding
All the features: background listening, sleep timer, speed controls, offline downloads
Support for creators: toggle ad skipping per show, and easily find membership options for podcasts you love

Join the waitlist at podtastic.app to get early access.