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Miguel Piedrafita
Miguel Piedrafita

Posted on • Originally published at miguelpiedrafita.com on

Getting the latest episodes instantly in Pocket Casts

Too tired to read? Listen to this article instead!

I use Pocket Casts as my only podcatcher. It's awesome, but I've noticed sometimes episodes take a while to appear. For example, someone tweets a link to the latest episode of their podcast, but it doesn't appear in the app, even when I hit refresh.

This is because Pocket Casts caches all the feeds you're subscribed to and refreshes them periodically. When you click the refresh button in your app, it just fetches the latest cached version but doesn't re-fetch it.

Fortunately, I managed to come up with a solution that'll bust the cache of a specific podcast. And this change will not only affect you, all Pocket Casts users will see the new episode in their podcatcher.

To use my trick, you'll first need to find the URL to the RSS feed for the podcast you want to refresh. This can be usually found on the podcast website. Once you have it, use a URL shortener like Bitly to create a shorter link. This'll pass through Pocket Casts' duplicate check and make it think it's a new feed you're adding.

Finally, go to Pocket Casts' submit page and paste the shortened URL. You should see the new episodes appearing in your app almost instantly!

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Joe Zack

I'm still getting used to the changes in the last version. I really miss the episode counts!