Podcasts rearrange themselves?

Hi olwags,

Happy New Year! The resource below will show you how to adjust the settings for your podcast subscriptions and organize your podcasts using the My Stations feature. Take a look at these options and see if resolves your issue of podcasts rearranging themselves.

Podcasts app for iOS: Managing subscriptions - Apple Support
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202949

Settings
There are two places you can change subscription settings for your podcasts.

• Default settings: From your Home screen, tap Settings and then Podcasts. These settings are shared by all of your podcast subscriptions. These are known as default podcast settings.
  
  • Refresh Every: You can choose how often your iOS device checks for new episodes to your subscriptions. It's set to check every six hours by default.
  • Limit Episodes: You can pick how many episodes you see for subscriptions.
  • Download Episodes: The latest episodes of your podcasts will download automatically if your iOS device is connected to Wi-Fi.
  • Delete Played Episodes: If this is turned on, episodes will delete 24 hours after you finish playing them.
  • Use Cellular Data: If your iOS device has a cellular connection, you can allow downloads to use cellular data when Wi-Fi isn't available. This is off by default. Downloads using cellular data are limited to 100MB per episode. If an episode is larger than that, it won't start downloading until you're connected to Wi-Fi.
• Podcast-specific settings: The second place you'll find subscription settings is within the Podcasts app. Tap a podcast subscription under My Podcasts and pull down with one finger to reveal the settings buttons. These settings are unique to each subscription. If you don't change anything here, the podcast subscription will just use the default settings. If you do make changes to a specific subscription’s settings, they'll only apply to that podcast.
  
  • Play: This setting lets you change the order in which a subscription plays. If you're listening to a news style podcast, you may want to set this to play the new episodes first. If the series is more episodic, you may prefer to play oldest to newest.
  • Sort Order: This changes the sort order of episodes that appear for a podcast (not its playback order).
  • Subscribed: When this is on, new episodes of this podcast will be marked as unplayed as they become available.
  • Refresh Every: You can choose how often your iOS device checks for new episodes to your subscriptions. It's set to check every six hours by default.
  • Limit Episodes: You can pick how many episodes you see for subscriptions.
  • Download Episodes: The latest episodes of your podcasts will download automatically.
  • Delete Played Episodes: If this is on, episodes will be deleted 24 hours after you finish playing them unless you've marked them as Saved.

Inactive subscriptions
If you do not play or access a subscription within 15 days, your subscription to that podcast will go inactive and you will no longer receive updates to it. As soon as you access the subscription again it will refresh.

Podcasts app for iOS: Organizing your podcasts with stations - Apple Support
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202959

Podcasts app for iOS: Organizing your podcasts with stations

Learn how to organize and group your podcasts in the Podcasts app for iOS by using stations.

With the Podcasts app for iOS, you can organize your podcast episodes in three different ways in the My Stations portion of the app:

• Stations are like smart playlists. You can set up rules, and the station will automatically update with podcast episodes of your subscriptions that match.
• On-The-Go allows you to manually create a list of podcast episodes from any of your subscriptions.
• iTunes Playlists are playlists of your podcasts you can make on a Mac or PC with iTunes. You can then access these playlists on your iOS device.

Create a station

1. Tap My Stations.
2. Tap New Station.
3. Give your new station a name and tap Save.
4. Choose which subscriptions you want to be a part of the station.
5. Tap Done.

After you set up a station, you can change its settings so that the station includes only a certain number of episodes, audio or video podcasts, or unplayed episodes. You can also set the playback order for a station and group them so that all episodes of one podcast play together.

Cheers,

Judy

I'm having this issue as well, and have often re-arranged the podcasts in the "My Podcasts" screen - (selecting edit and then moving their order around based on which I listen to the most). However the order I select never seems to stick.

Is there any way to ensure that the manual order I select sticks in the "My Podcasts" screen without having to use the "My Stations" feature?

also - just to confirm, I'm wanting to affect the order of the main podcast icons - not of particular episodes within each podcast.

I don't know if this will help anyone else here, but I discovered that when I had iTunes running on my iMac for a couple days (where it is usually closed unless I'm using it), my podcasts rearranged themselves during those days - presumably based on an auto-download setting I have in iTunes? Once I killed iTunes, it stopped. I haven't played with turning off all downloads on iTunes to test it. Hope that helps you too.