The Apple Podcasts app on iOS has a setting:
What does this setting do?
That should seem like a obvious answer, right? Once an episode ends, the app stops playing, and remains so until the user interacts with it to manually play another episode.
That’s not the way the application behaves. What actually happens; if you have multiple episodes of a particular show on your device, stored locally within the Podcasts library, and you play one, all the remaining episodes will be put into the “Playing Next” queue. Each episode will be auto-played after the previous finishes.
So this is a setting to disable or enable Continuous Playback, that doesn’t have any effect on whether Continuous Playback happens, because Apple is a company that has no respect for the concept of Consent.
The user does not explicitly consent to Continuous Playback.
The user actively signals that they do not consent to Continuous Playback.
Yet, Apple goes ahead and does Continuous Playback to them, regardless.
Don’t ever leave your drink unattended with someone from Apple’s Podcasts.app team. Too harsh?
The purpose of a system is what it does.
The biggest company in the world, and the people who work there do not deserve the benefit of your doubt. They would fix this if they cared. They woud fix this if they found the idea of software ignoring user consent to be offensive in some way. They don’t, because they don’t.