What's new in Podtastic, September 24, 2026

I've been shipping and not writing, so this is a catch-up across both apps rather than one week. You can now save the bit you just heard. You can rearrange the app so it matches how you use it. And the battery cost of all of it dropped sharply.

Save the moment you just heard

Smart Clips is the biggest thing in here, and it's on both iPhone and Android.

You're listening, someone says something worth keeping, and you want it later. Open the player menu and save a clip, or press the back button on your headphones. It confirms with a chime and a "Clip saved" flash, so you know it worked without looking at your phone. That matters when you're walking or driving.

Every clip gets an AI summary and goes to one place, ready to replay or share. If you've since deleted the episode a clip came from, the clip offers to download it back rather than dead-ending. We wrote a longer piece on how clips fit into the way people actually listen if you want the fuller picture.

An app shaped the way you actually use it

There's a More tab now, and the first three slots in the tab bar are yours. Pick which surfaces fill them, reorder them, and everything else lives under More. If you never open Playlists, stop giving it a permanent seat.

Library defaults let you set playback speed and download behaviour once, then apply them across every show. Per-podcast overrides stay intact for the few shows that need something different. Previously you set the same preference over and over.

You can also switch Smart Skip on or off for one podcast at a time, which is useful for shows where you want to hear everything. If you're not sure what it does, we explained what Smart Skip is actually doing in its own post.

And when you need to clear a backlog, select a range of episodes and apply one action to all of them: mark played, download, remove downloads, queue, or add to a playlist. Long-press a row, or use "Select Episodes" from the menu if you're on VoiceOver.

A much lighter app on your battery

This was the quiet theme of the last few releases, and it made more difference than any new feature did.

The app now syncs only what changed instead of pulling your whole listening history every time it launches. It skips re-downloading podcast feeds that haven't moved. It does far less work while you're playing with the screen locked. On iPhone, Low Power Mode now eases background processing automatically, so the phone isn't fighting itself when you're already low.

The sleep timer got fixed properly too. "End of episode" used to be a wall-clock guess, so playback speed, Skip Silence and Smart Skip all conspired to finish the episode early. The queue moved on, and the timer then stopped the next show part-way through. People were falling asleep to one podcast and waking up inside another.

Out of Experimental, and on for everyone

Jump to Video and Smart Clips were both opt-in features buried in Experimental Features. They're on by default now on both platforms, and your preferences follow you across devices.

In the car, CarPlay plays any downloaded episode you haven't listened to yet, including one that's still being prepared, rather than hiding it until processing finishes. Android Auto got a much bigger overhaul than that, enough that it needed its own write-up on what Android Auto can do.

Playback also stops resuming onto your phone's loudspeaker when headphones or a car stereo disconnect, which is a fix I'm glad nobody has to explain to me again.

When something breaks, you can tell us properly

Feature requests and bug reports now take comments, so you can add to someone else's report instead of filing a duplicate that I then have to merge by hand.

Requests can be marked acknowledged. That means I've read it and agree it should happen, which is separate from it being built. Before that, "no response yet" and "not going to happen" looked identical from the outside, which is a bad way to treat someone who took the time to write in. One notification preference covers email and push for updates on anything you're following.

Smaller fixes

• Fixed some people being signed out overnight, where a token refresh landed after the app had already been suspended
• Fixed new episodes not appearing in a show, especially with "Hide played" on. An interrupted refresh used to mark every podcast as "just checked" while having checked nothing, so the app stopped looking
• Topics no longer start mid-intro, and intros and outros are labelled in the topic list
• Swiping down inside an episode transcript scrolls the transcript instead of closing the player
• Fixed starting a video episode while audio was playing, which left both running at once with no way to stop the audio
• Fixed Smart Skip points vanishing from an episode after an update or a restart
• Fixed losing your place after switching headphones or speakers, and after an unexpected quit
• Fixed a crash when switching accounts, and audio from the previous account carrying over
• A damaged download now repairs itself instead of retrying forever
• Podcasts you've just added sort to the top of your library with a New badge
• Fixed switching between monthly and annual plans on iPhone, which had been broken since launch
• Faster library scrolling, and better contrast on controls that sit over show artwork

Next up is the work that makes episode preparation faster and steadier still. It's the least glamorous thing we do and the one that decides whether everything else feels good.

Listen smarter with Podtastic

Want to try these improvements yourself? Podtastic is a fully featured podcast player for iOS and Android, built around Smart Features (the AI features) and Audio Enhancements (deterministic DSP tuned for spoken-word audio):

• Smart Skip — auto-skips commonly-skipped sections of an episode (intros, recaps, asides), powered by AI topic detection plus aggregated listening data; a single tap on any control surface jumps you to the next Smart Topic on demand
• Smart Summaries — AI summaries of every podcast and episode so you know what's coming before you hit play
• Smart Topics — key topics surfaced across your favourite shows so you can jump straight to what matters
• Skip Silence — auto-removes silences from speech so episodes flow without dragging
• Enhance Voices — a gentle EQ and compression preset that keeps voices clear in any room

If you'd rather see what else is out there first, we keep an honest directory of independent podcast apps, competitors included.

Download now at podtastic.app and try it for yourself.