I have searched for existing threads about this problem
on
App version
3.12.3f
Android version
Graphene OS, Android 17, stable release channel, Build 2026102101
Device model
Pixel 7a
Expected behaviour
Pods continue to play normally.
Current behaviour
I often get a state where a pod just stops playing, and goes back to ‘paused’ state. Hitting play sometimes plays some more but it will often just stick again. Skipping forward and playing usually works, but often only for a minute or two. Waiting longer before trying skip seems to make it more likely to work. This issue is erratic and thus hard to pin down an report, which is why I am putting it here under the ‘support’ tab, rather than a bug report.
I’m hoping it’s not just me otherwise this may well be hard to track down. But I did not find any similar reports.
I also have a possibly-related issue where if the sleep timer goes off and fades out, then playback gets permanently stuck and will not play more than about 2 seconds. quitting the app does not fix this - I have to reboot the phone, and then it’s fine again. This one almost certainly is a bug, but I’m puting it here in case we think they are related.
Background: I have been using antennapod for many years. It’s been great. It worked fine on this phone for quite a while before I noticed this problem. I’m sure I used the sleep timer successfully a couple of times before it got into this ‘always breaks playback completely’ mode.
The more general ‘playback self-pauses’ issue is definitely getting worse over time. It was occasional and is now regular.
One thing that may be worth noting is that I have a lot of stuff queued up. There are 1485 episodes in my queue (and 404 in the inbox).
First occurred
Some months ago. At least May 2026, but it could be most of a year? For the ‘getting stuck’ behaviour. The timer issue I first noticed in June when I discovered the timer feature.
Steps to reproduce
Set the sleep timer to N mins, and play a pod for N mins without touching anything, so it fades out and play pauses.
Now, if I tap ‘play’ it plays a second or 2 then stops again. If I try again it starts again from the same spot.
If I try to skip forward 30 secs or play another pod, it always plays about 1 second of audio and then stops.
If I quit antennapod and restart it, the problem remains. The rest of the UK works - it’s just playback that is stuck.
I can playback on other apps (e..g Newpipe works fine). So it’s not audio in general on the device, just audio through antennapod.
For the less-broken state where it just randomly pauses play:
If I hit play again it plays a second or so and then goes back to paused. Always starting at the same spot (just as above).
However, if I skip 30 seconds forward and hit play again it will usually work for a while. Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 2 mins, maybe the rest of the pod.
If I wait longer (30 secs+) before trying to play again or skip it sometimes carries on from the same spot and certainly makes skip+play more likely to work. This makes it feel like something is ‘too busy’ or it is waiting a really long time for some buffer to fill up so it can play more.
For long time I thought it was stopping due to corrupted files, as skipping forward (‘past the error’) usually let it play on, but as I’ve had more experience with it, I’ve concluded that it’s not about the files - it’s something to do with the playback machinery.
I am very stuck on how to debug all this. Clues from people who understand the machinery are very welcome. Is there some sort of logging I can do to help narrow down the problem? Or settings?
The tricky bit is that it generally all works fine after a reboot, maybe for a week or two before it starts to get ‘pausy’ again. So anything takes quite some time to test.