Podcasts won't auto delete

Having exactly the same problem. I've posted this on a few Apple related forums already - although admittedly not this one - but no answers yet. I get the feeling that other people are getting this to work so it's not a Podcast app bug.

I'm deleting listened to podcasts manually by swiping right on the podcast once I've listened to it.

I don't understand what I might not be doing - I have the podcast subscribed to and auto-delete is switched on and set to keep unplayed episodes only.

I've tried leaving some for a while in case there's a 'schedule' of some sort for when these listened-to podcasts get deleted but nothing has happened so far..and that's after eight weeks!

I have the same problem. It will manually keep podcasts that I've listened to seemingly indefinitely. The only way to clear them is to swipe and hit the delete button but the problem with doing this is that it deletes them from the list entirely, so if I wanted to listen to it ever again, I'd have to go into the Store section and find it instead of just tapping on it in the podcast feed. It's really annoying.

I am having the exact same problem. It's quite infuriating.

iPhone 5, iOS 6.0.2

I am having the same problem on my 4s running 6.0.1. Also download speeds or horribly slowed down no matter the speed of the wifi network I am on.

I have this problem, but I wonder if this is a bug related to already being subscribed to the podcasts via itunes and having everything set to auto-sync, prior to downloading the Podcast app and setting all my podcasts up as subscriptions there. I am considering removing every subscription and clearing my itunes podcasts, then adding the subscriptions back in the Podcast app to see if it works.

The fact that new episodes do download correctly is still worth it for me. I find that if I manually delete the episodes and every now and then I toggle the subscription from On to Off and back to On, the episodes I deleted show up again in the queue as potential items to download. Manually deleting shouldn't remove them from the list, though.

I have been doing the same thing. It's not perfect, but it works.

When it became clear that podcasts would not sync between the Mac and the iPhone the way I wanted them to, I stopped using iTunes for podcasts. Since then, I have added a few new subscriptions on iOS, but they all still have the same problem with auto-delete. Oh, well. Perhaps we'll get an update some day.

A workaround I've found for them disappearing from the list is, after deleting them, to just unsubscribe then immediately resubscribe to the podcast. This will make all available episodes show up, but they will still be deleted off of your device.

They never seem to auto-delete for me either, so I manually delete then use the above workaround.