Podcast Storage Mystery

I've just figured out a solution.

In iOS10, simply DELETE the podcast app and you'll get rid of the mysterious storage. You can then re-install it from the App Store if you want.

Feel like Apple is not willing to improve this product because it's not profitable.

I went through this whole issue before and I ended up deleting the Podcast app and reinstalling. I didn't want to go through this again, so I went on the hunt for an app that will work. Today I downloaded an app called Memory&Disk RAM Scanner Pro (Phan Minh Nhut) which was free. The first time I used it, it didn't clear out the Podcast Documents & Data, but it worked the second time I scanned, and then scanned again for good measure. I went from 2.76 GB to 131.1 MB. Magic! Thank goodness, I really don't understand why this is such an issue with Apple, but this one works, so grab it before it disappears.

Go to the iPhone's Settings, choose General, and then choose "Storage & iCloud Usage". Then select "Manage Storage", which should list all the apps. Then select "Podcasts". What I see (iPhone 5, iOS 9.0.2) is two sections: "Podcasts", with the different podcasts and memory allocation listed, and below that "Documents & Data." The top part is editable - you can erase podcasts from it, although it just gives you the title of the podcast "series", not the individual episode. I occasionally find episodes that should be gone still in there, so I erase them; it also includes the ones that you've played in the past 24 hours, but haven't been deleted yet, because for whatever reason Apple doesn't wipe them for another 24 hours. If you want to wipe out all podcasts, you can do it there.

But then there's the second section, "Documents & Data." Mine is 2.9GB and growing - annoying but not critical on my 64GB phone. On 16GB it'd be infuriating. As far as I can tell there is nothing you can do about that. Some people report that it goes down once in a while, but I've never noticed that; once I did a full restore and got it down to a few hundred MB, but it quickly grew to multiple GB again. At least now it's no longer growing as quickly.

OK, yeah - I think you've done all you can. I've read that restoring an iPhone as new can get rid of most of that Documents & Data - in my case, yes, it got rid of most of it, but I think that was dropping it from 3GB down to 400MB or so anyway (i.e. to your level now!), and it quickly climbed back up again.

I'm curious what'll happen if you just don't download another podcast. Will the memory go down over the next week?

For what it's worth, I moved to Overcast a couple of days ago and have entirely emptied out any podcasts in the Podcasts app, with no more podcasts coming in. There's nothing there now. Documents & Data for the Podcasts app has dropped all the way from 3.0GB to 2.9GB. I'm curious if that'll drop any further over the next few days as caches or whatever may or may not get emptied.

I've moved to Overcast too, removed everything form Podcasts and still have 607MB of storage. The current versions iOS 9.1 (13B143) still haven't fixed this issue. Looking forward for a fix.

Well, when I was still using the Podcasts app, Documents & Data was 3.0GB. After I wiped out all podcasts from the app, it dropped to 2.9GB. Now, a week later, with nothing coming in or out of the app, it's dropped further - to 2.8GB! So at this rate it should go away in six months or so.

When I have a day when I'll be staying near my computer I'll try to restore from a backup, but last time I did that it wound up taking a big chunk of the day, so I'm not too eager to go through it again. It is rather irksome that an app I no longer even use is taking up the second-most space of any app on my iPhone - only Music has more.

The saga continues: I restored from a backup today, and the Documents & Data for Podcasts is still taking up 2.8GB, even though it's now been almost two weeks since I erased every podcast and turned off all subscriptions. So restoring from a backup apparently does nothing to get rid of that Documents & Data stuff.

I guess that means my next tactic will be a factory reset, if I really care about getting those 2.8GB back. Ugh.

(The restore from backup isn't hassle-free either: at least it only took 30 minutes, but now for some reason iTunes can't see my Photos library, and only wants to sync pictures from iPhoto, and all the pictures I'd synced are gone.)

I would love an answer to this too. I have 1.2 gigs worth of podcasts on my phone and 7.6 Gigs...(YES 7.6!) in Documents & Data. C'mon Apple, your taking a quarter of my phone's memory for one buggy app.

Same thing here:

300 MB taken by podcasts and 1.1 GB taken by the Podcast app... this is terrible. Specially if you have a 16GB iPhone.

This is obviously a bug. I hope it gets fixed on iOS 9.2.

Well for me it's been three weeks since I wiped everything out of the Podcasts app and moved to Overcast, and Documents & Data is still 2.8GB, so I think I can assume it's not some kind of temporary cache issue that'll gradually run down.

It'd be nice if 9.2 would fix this, but it was a problem back in iOS8 too.

And yeah, on a 16GB phone that problem is awful. At least I've got a 64GB.

Такая же проблема. Записи удаляются из программы, а из памяти телефона нет.

Did you ever find a solution for this?

I'm having a similar provlem with the Podcasts app not clearing its cache using up now more than a 1GB of storage on a 16GB 5s (iOS 9.1)

Nope. I reported this bug directly to Apple but I haven't heard from them yet. Maybe we all should report this bug... hopefully they will take it more seriously. This is the link: Bug Reporting - Apple Developer - https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/