iOS: Skipping episodes when fastforwarding via lockscreen
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We had one of our users report to us the following:
Dragging to the end of an episode timeline while on the iPhone Lock Screen sometimes results in the next episode in the playlist being archived.
Sometimes if I want to skip the rest of a podcast that’s currently playing I’ll simply pick up my phone, tap and drag the timeline to the end. The expectation is that the next podcast in my playlist will start.
Instead, about half the time, the next podcast episode artwork will appear for a split second, then it will skip again to the next podcast and instantly archive the one that briefly appeared.
This does not seem to happen from inside the app, only on the Lock Screen of the phone.
Many on our team tried replicating the issue but so far have been unsuccessful with getting this to happen.
What would help is if those affected could share:
- Does it happen with all podcasts or just specific ones?
- What are some examples of episodes that it happened on?
- Since when did you notice this start happening?
Once we know this, we will be able to dig into it further!
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I’m thinking this might be related to my problem. Sometimes one episode will end and the next thing on the playlist will be skipped over. When I refer to the Listening History, I see that it is marked as played, and I mark it unplayed and add it back into the playlist. Unfortunately, it does not alert me to the problem; only if I know what was supposed to play do I catch it.
As mentioned, I rarely do notice that the artwork for the skipped episode does appear for a flash. But I don’t know if that is consistently true.
I don’t use the skip first/skip last feature, but I do listen to almost all talking podcasts at 1.5x, meaning that sometimes the software may show that 2-3 seconds are skipped at the very end.
The problem seems very random, and I can’t recreate it on demand. It happened today using an iPhone SE 2020 with iOS 17.5.1. Your version is 7.66.0.3. It has been happening for many versions over many months.
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Hi there, @hinson3d833aa644
Do you recall whether you may have fast-forwarded by dragging the playback position to a different spot?
Also, does it happen with just certain podcasts or you noticing it happen with any of them?
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I rarely drag the position, but I very frequently use the forward (25 seconds) and backward (15 sec) buttons to maneuver around ads. I can’t think of any consistency in which podcasts are affected, but I’ll start watching that.
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Thanks for sharing that with us, @hinson3d833aa644
Additionally, it would be a good idea to check your debug logs after it happens again by going to ‘Profile > Help & feedback > scroll all the way down > Get in touch > Get Support > tap “Attached Logs” > scroll down to “Debug Logs” and then click to view it.
To understand what is going on, you can view our guide here: https://support.pocketcasts.com/knowledge-base/understanding-pocket-casts-logs/
Pasting it here if you have trouble understanding it would also be a good idea!
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This has been happening to me for a few months as well! There seems to be a relation with the sleep timer. It happened before the redesign of the sleep timer and still happens now.
I often set the sleeptimer to the end of the episode when I go to sleep. The next morning I rewind the episode to where I fell asleep and listen to the rest. When the episode finishes instead of playing the next episode in the queue, the next episode in the queue is immediately marked as completed and therefore skipped after which it starts playing the episode that was in the queue after that.
It happens regularly but not every time. It is quite annoying, especially when the queue consists of multiple episodes from the same podcast and it takes a while to notice you missed a complete episode. Then you have to manually put it back in the queue, mark the episode it started accidentally as played and then as unplayed again(I’d love to just always have a ‘mark as unplayed’ button by the way) and then add that one to the queue again as well…
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