Pocket Casts features a number of storage tools to help manage your episodes including options to:
- Auto archive episodes after playing — Android and iOS
- Auto archive inactive episodes
- Delete downloaded episodes
Removing downloads from your Up Next queue
To free up storage by removing downloaded episodes from your Up Next queue:
- Open the Up Next queue
- Tap Select at the top right to activate multi-select
- Select the episodes you want to clean up (or tap Select All)
- Tap Archive to remove the episodes and delete their downloads
Archiving removes the download from your device but the episode remains available to re-download later. For more details on multi-select actions, see Using Multi-Select.
Tip: To preserve your queue order before making bulk changes, you can save your current Up Next queue as a playlist. When you play a playlist with “Save your current Up Next queue as a playlist” enabled, the old queue is saved as a playlist named “Up Next – [Date].” See Playlists for details.
There is no option to conditionally remove downloads based on age (e.g., “remove all downloads older than a year”). You can use the Clean Up tool under Profile > Downloads to remove downloads by status category.
Streaming by default instead of downloading
Streaming by default instead of downloading:
- Tap Profile
- Tap the Settings cog
- Select General
- Set Row Action to Play
When your device has less than 10% of storage available, a banner notification will display on the Downloads screen. Tap “Manage downloads” to free up space. Available in version 7.77 and higher on Android and 7.78 and higher on iOS.
iOS stores additional cache that is not visible to Pocket Casts. For this reason the storage usage reported in the Settings app will be greater than what’s reported in Pocket Casts.
Even when Pocket Casts deletes downloaded files, iOS doesn’t immediately reflect that the space has been freed up. iOS only reclaims that storage when the system decides it needs to.
The Pocket Casts mobile app does not support automatically storing episode downloads in an arbitrary location. However, on Android, you can configure the app to save episode data to an SD card.
