I consumed every single episode of this podcast: one per week, like clockwork. Some of them on a different device, sure. But that information is synced via iCloud. I actively subscribed to this thing. Why are you fucking with my subscriptions? It’s not like you’re Google and have an incentive to fuck around with what people see and what they don’t.

As if the mere existence of this “feature” wasn’t bad enough, of course there is also no way to disable it. And it’s hard to tell if it is buggy or just shitty: I could not yet understand when/why exactly it happens. Sometimes it disables podcasts that simply haven’t published a new episode in a while – so is it actually time-based, not play-based?

The official documentation says this:

If you stop listening to a show for a while, Apple Podcasts might pause your subscription. The shows and downloaded episodes stay in your library, but new episodes might not be updated. To continue getting new episodes, subscribe again.

“Might”. Who in their right mind thinks that “might” is an acceptable word here?