Can Played Downloads Auto-Delete?

The answer (for me) is no. I have to delete them manually. Send feedback to Apple so thay can fix it.

yes, they do reappear.. some even as unplayed.. very annoying! especially because if there are older podcasts in the list, the app will continue auto-playing them..

Do you have a link for sending feedback? I have the same problem and it is really annoying.

I've been having the same issue. It's pretty frustrating. They also don't seem to automatically download new episodes even though I have that option checked. (Some podcasts do and some don't... seemingly random.)

Apple's feedback line is http://www.apple.com/feedback They don't have a section for Podcasts in iOS yet, so I'm filtering my requests through their iTunes section. Hopefully the engineers are working on this, but perhaps they've just been bogged down with getting things ready for iTunes 11.

laughable. the feedback page doesn't even have a choice for itunes let alone podcasts (or maps...). so I'm supposed to just grin and bear it?

fwiw i have noticed that the auto-download and auto-delete only seems to apply to the first few podcasts per day. So if you subscribe to a high volume podcast (like most of the bloomberg offerings) then the majority of new podcasts have to be manually downloaded. which means they don't auto delete. boy, do I enjoy going through each podcast page and manually deleting dozens of podcasts each week. iOS6. what a piece of @#$%@ cr@p.

I'm not even sure what that option (which ones to keep) does, if anything. I assumed like you apparently did that it would get rid of the ones that were played.

I will say that you can fix the feed list problem at least, without reinstalling the entire app. If you just unsubscribe from the podcast then resubscribe it seems to regenerate the list. You can delete the downloaded ones, then in the options for that podcast (where you would set the download setting), flip the subscription option to off then back on.

I've just set most of my podcasts to not autodownload because of this problem. The only ones I download now are the ones that only keep 1 or 2 episodes active.

We now have a new version of the Podcasts app but this problem still exists for me.

And all of my played podcast episodes are eating up the free space on my iPhone.

Auto delete seems to be as nonfunctional as ever.

At least the new interface allows for batch delete. Which is much better than swipe/delete dozens of podcasts one by one, what I was doing before.

Well, it seems I was mistaken. Podcasts appears to be deleting all played episodes now. Which is great. I'll have a slice of that humble pie...