Podcasts not deleting as expected

Hello. I’m interested to know what I’ve been doing wrong regarding deletion of old podcasts.

App version : 3.5.0 (from Google Play)
Android version : 14
Device model : Google Pixel 8 Pro
Expected behaviour : Old, listened podcast media files deleted
Current behaviour : Old media files retained forever, as far as I can tell
First occurred : Forever, AFAIK
Steps to reproduce : n/a
Environment : * Data folder: /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/de.danoeh.antennapod/files

So I was taken by surprise to see that I had over 80gb of old podcasts on my phone. I thought that after listening to a podcast it would automatically delete the media file from my device. But no. I fixed the issue of all the media files on my device by backing up the database, wiping the app, importing the database and then downloading the files I needed - this worked perfectly BTW, kudos to the team.

But I don’t want to deal with this again. I’ve set the app to “Delete after playing”. Will that delete the locally stored media or will I have to keep on nuking the app? I saw the option to “Auto delete from local folders” but that gives me a warning that they can never be downloaded from Antenna Pod. That’s fair enough but is that the option I need to enable just to get rid of locally stored files?

You probably could have recovered this without the re-install of the app. Chances are, and no way to tell now, that you didn’t have the Delete after Playing set overall in the global settings.

Try your new install and current config on a short podcast and watch what happens to it.

Note: each subscription can override the global defaults. In the subscription settings, you’ll see the Delete after Playing settings.

In addition: You can just look at the “downloads” screen to see what is downloaded. There you can also delete the downloads