Your moved path should still work, the only path that can’t and already doesn’t work as far as I understand it is ~ and anything directly under it.
What happens even now in your case is that your config is read from the default paths and then based on that it will look for downloads at the path you mentioned.
You can still use your SD card because that is a permission gPodder will request.
The idea of application jails is good, you don’t want one application to read secrets from other applications etc, though the way that gPodder has to ask for permissions to allow most custom paths still ends up pretty broad.
I’m already pretty late to the party implementing this and Jolla has already moved to forcing sailjail on all application just with very broad permissions, while I could continue ignoring it that would just mean that if/when they stop the broader transitional permissions there would be far more pain in migrating.
OK, so that is not the default. I honestly couldn’t remember anymore.
I’m not worried for myself btw, I just meant that the folder containing the actual media is the only thing some users might even care for; apart from that, automigration ahoy!
I’m happy to announce version 4.18.0 - “Cherut”
Cherut has some UI/UX improvements, on the Player it will display a chapter list should the podcast provide chapter information and the shownotes are now also shown in the player.
At the moment the chapters are “inert” but I already have a version where you can tap them to jump to them, however since it is also part of further changes to the Player UI/UX and I really wanted to make this release already that will come in the next release.
On the player the cover art also behaves better than it used to, where in the past it would not always show properly that should now no longer be the case.
Lastly the loading screen now shows for as long as it takes to load all the podcasts and gives basic feedback on what is happening.
The last change is also the first step towards the switch to enabling/properly configuring sailjail, at this time it will show the status of the different folders, which should be “needs migration”, in the future it will also actually run the migration, I am considering also adding this information to the Settings page, but maybe that is too much effort for something that should hopefully be a one time occurrence.
For those who do want to handle the move themselves creating a .gpodder-migrate-ignore file in each directory that needs migration will now show the message “user inhibited” and when I implement the actual migration code will skip the folder.
The next version will probably refine most of the concepts introduced now and in the last version a bit more and when the SailJail config ships it will be 5.0.
Thanks to @eson for the rapid submission of Swedish translations, please note that I made this release fast so all the many translating heroes did not really have time to update the translations yet, sorry about that.
I would like to thank my sponsors on GitHub (@PeperJohnny and @schmittlauch) and while I hate to be begging like this it really does help me, these days I am a freelancer in the programming/sysadmin Linux/HPC space and the last period has been brutally dry for me, so if you can sponsor me or if you would like to send some work my way please DM me.
I have a question for you guys about chapters, there is already a pull down menu item to get to a chapter overview when chapters are available, this would seem to be the more “SFOS” way of doing things, so should I just leave it at that or do you prefer having a dropdown menu on the playerpage?
(Please note that at least based on my own experience it seems that podcasts with chapters are somewhat of a rarity, at least none of the ~25 English podcasts that I follow have them I now am subscribed to a German podcast just to test these features, so it could be you never saw this yet)
Very difficult to answer because i have not podcasts with chapters. So my vote is “both” 
I see zero votes on “both” in the poll results.
The following may be more of a question for Jolla people but maybe also people here can help:
I have at least one open issue related to remapping of unicode characters to ascii, my assumption is that this was done back in the day to enable storing podcasts on FAT32 filesystems, myself I format my SD cards with Linux filesystems and modern cards ship with exFAT which supports unicode so I am wondering whether this is still needed.
@vige maybe you or someone on the team has some insights about this? Should I open this as a new topic since it is not only related to gPodder?
I’m a bit late, the poll is closed. But I vote for pulldown.
I have tried all three podcast apps I could find on Jolla Store.
gPodder is the only one left on my phone because it has the least amount of obvious bugs, but it is not really usable on my phone (xperia 10 v, sailfish os 5.0.0.67).
Issues:
Hey,
Hope these answers will be useful:
We add playback rate control, please note that it is not the stablest of things but since this is also the case for other media applications that use it we’re still adding it.
Release 4.13.0 - "Osher" · gpodder/gpodder-sailfish · GitHub
Restore after backup:
I would like to reflash my XA2 Ultra from image, since an OTA update ruined most store & account functionality.
How about gPodder: It is my most important application on this device.
I have thousands of saved podcast files (bringing gPodder to a crawl) and I would like to “save” the status of my gPodder.
I have a gut feeling that making backup in Sailfish menu will not be sufficient to restore my gPodder database.
Any files I should save?
Not urgent nor important, but advice & experience sharing welcome 
Podcast files are stored separately in Downloads/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish. Just rename the folder, should speed up your gPodder again.
These are the default folders:
The first is the most important to you as it contains the database and any downloaded episodes, the last has the settings that are adjustable so if you made changes you’d want that.
The second only contains logs.
You can do what @ohnonot suggests to speed things up but note that any episode that was downloaded and no longer exists on disk is marked as deleted and you’d have to change the marking manually.
Also if I’m not mistaken if you have downloaded episodes that were later retracted the downloaded version continues to appear in your episode list as long as it exists on disk, while I am not 100% certain and would need to check the behaviour in code I believe that after it does not exist on disk if it also doesn’t exist in the RSS of the podcast it is purged from your episode list and restoring the file will not bring it back to the episode list.
I hope to make some time soon to make a new release
Hi! After changing the downloads directory in Gpodder 4.18.0, the app tells me at every launch that my data, config and cache directories needed migration. How do I migrate these directories?
Thank you.
Moving the directories to the SDCard (where the download directory now resides) doesn’t work.
Hi
As stated in the changelog and in this post here that message is about the migration that will be required when I finally enable SailJail properly for gPodder.
The upcoming version will have the migration logic but is not yet going to do the migration as things stand right now, I will also give more information about the exact logic and paths so that people can test it.
Hope that explains things!
As I said before the upcoming logic of the migration process.
gPodder has an internal variable called progname the first check is to see whether it matches hardcoded variables for old and I guess also for new once that has been chosen, resulting in the following pseudo code:
if progname == OLDNAME:
dryrun = True
# This would only be introduced 1-2 versions after the migration
# Or maybe some on disk flag needs to be set
#elif progname == NEWNAME:
# continue
else:
# set paths
dryrun = False
The further checks are as follows (for 3 paths):
# check if directory exists
if not os.path.isdir(f'{path}'):
# nothing to do
continue
if os.path.isfile(f'{path}/.gpodder-migrate-ignore'):
# user surpressed
continue
if os.path.isdir('f{newpath}'):
# potential collision, warn user
continue
After which the move will be done with os.rename or shutil.move, currently I lean towards os.rename since it won’t require another import but it would not be able to move across filesystem boundaries.
As for the paths the old ones are:
~/.local/share/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish/
~/.cache/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish/
~/.config/harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish/
The new one would be made up of the sailjail organisation name and application name, which I think will mean that it will be org.gpodder/sailfish/ once I have actually tested that I will update this.
Please feel free to chime in if you think I am making logic errors or wrong assumptions or otherwise going off the straight and narrow path 
Thanks for this wonderful Audiocast-App for Sailfish OS. (I don’t like the word “podcast”, it’s too closely associated with the Apple iPod)
Maybe it would be a good idea to add support for My Backup | OpenRepos.net — Community Repository System. That way you could choose gPodder as a backup target and MyBackup would save all necessary configuration (subscribed audiocasts, app settings). I don’t think downloaded audio files should be included in the backup because of their size.
That is going to be part of the update which also does proper SailJail.