Question about Popup after Enabling/Disabling Auto-Download in feed settings

Story:
I just wanted to exclude a few feeds from my daily auto downloads, since they are all added to queue even if I don’t want to listen to them now.
So I headed to the feed settings and disabled the auto download and received a popup with the content:

Use on existing episodes
The new Auto-Download-Setting will be automaticalle be used on new episodes.
Do you want to include already released episodes?
(Rughly translated from german)

Question:
Is it wanted the popup will be shown for enabling and disabling?
There is no indicator what was choosen before or what the normal behavior is and I don’t know the expected behavior for any usecase.

  • Enabling and No: Will it only download new episodes from this date?
  • Enabling and Yes: Will it download also already released episodes which are marked as new?
    (Sidequestion: I believe “new” means new since adding the feed?)
  • Disabling and No: Epidsodes marked as new but released before changing this setting still getting downloaded? Which they already should been?
  • Disabling and Yes: Completley off?

Edit: Also what is the standart behaviour? Since you can close the popup by taping outside of the box.

So I don’t know if the behavior is intentional, but it is also confusing (at least for me).

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Enable global auto download
  2. Add podcast
  3. Disable auto download for this feed
  4. Enable the auto download again

Environment:
Autodownload global: on

Xiaomi Mi 9t Pro - Miui12 - Android 10
AntennaPod 2.0.0-RC7

1 Like

The dialog is shown intentionally but I totally agree that it is confusing. Even though I know what it does to the database, I have not noticed a difference between the two options in daily usage. I am not a heavy user of the auto download feature, though, so others who actually use it might know more.

Over the years, the auto download feature got enhanced more and more without thinking about average users. In general, options were constantly added without thinking about the cost of new options (maintenance, ease to use). In the future, my goal with AntennaPod is to be easier to use.

In general, I would love to re-write both auto download and auto delete. Unfortunately, I only have really limited time at the moment.

1 Like

So it is known and maybe sometime it will be changed.

I haven’t found a differnt behaviour at all and I am okay with pressing yes everytime. :wink:

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.