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Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

Podcast apps tend to save everything for some stupid reason. My iPhone was full and I noticed Overcast had saved like 3 GB of old episodes. Pretty terrible UX.

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The default in Overcast is to delete after listening and to save only 3 episodes from each subscription, which is quite sensible IMO.

it still seems to...not do this correctly? I have it configured thus but still have to delete 1GB+ of old episodes manually on a regular basis.

Are you sure the episode finished, or did you start another at the end of the episode when it was essentially dead air?

I think I usually just let it run until it plays the next episode, but I'll pay better attention the next time I use the app.

Stupidest one for me is Twitter, after install the app rapidly balloons to 100meg+ for a service that just streams tiny text messages.

Tiny text messages, profile images, avatars, inline linked media, etc.

Start caching the stuff you obviously don't want to re-fetch over HTTP every single time the user scrolls around in their timeline, and 100MB is a pretty reasonable footprint.

If you don't let it finish (say you don't care about that last ad or the outro music and you jump to another episode), it'll keep the file.

Similarly, when you transfer to a new phone or restore, it won't take those files with the backup, and if you have a bunch of files still around, it'll re-download those, taking several hours or days.

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