Apple Podcasts only lets you copy 200 words at a time — here's the workaround

The number floating around forums (“200 words”, “1000 characters”) isn't exact. In testing across iOS 17.4 through 18.2, the iPhone Apple Podcasts transcript view caps a single drag-selection at roughly 1,200-1,500 characters, which lands at 180- 240 English words depending on speaker pace. The selection handles physically refuse to extend past that boundary; you see them stop at a soft “wall” in the text.

Tap-and-hold on a single word doesn't help — it gives you the same 200-word ceiling. Switching to landscape doesn't help. There's no “Select all” action in the long-press menu. There is no Share button on the transcript view at all.

Apple has never publicly explained the limit, but two pressures plausibly drive it:

1. Publisher protection. The Apple Podcasts Connect transcripts spec was negotiated with publishers on the explicit understanding that the transcript would be a follow-along feature, not a redistribution feature. A bulk-copy button would have let any user repackage a paid show as plain text in two clicks.
2. UI consistency.The same selection cap exists in iOS Safari for very long elements; it's a WebKit/UIKit ceiling tuned for performance on older iPhones. Apple may simply have used the platform default rather than custom-tuning it for this view.

Whichever it is, the result is the same: there's no supported way to lift the limit through Settings or any official entitlement.

A few real episode lengths to make this concrete:

• A typical 60-minute podcast episode runs 9,000-11,000 words. At 200 words per copy that's ~50 manual selections.
• An Acquired-style 4-hour episode is closer to 38,000-45,000 words — somewhere around 200 separate copy-paste cycleswith no “continue selection” affordance.
• A Lex Fridman 3-hour episode (~30,000 words) takes most people 90+ minutes of mechanical thumb work. The selection handles also reset between scrolls, so it's easy to duplicate or skip a chunk.

And critically, you have to do this on iPhone. There's no Mac, no Web, no Windows app to switch to. AirDrop the resulting Notes back to your laptop, hope you didn't lose a section, fix the speaker labels by hand.

If you absolutely need the full transcript today, in priority order:

1. Re-transcribe the audio yourself.Apple doesn't own the audio — the publisher does, and it's almost always available via the show's public RSS feed as an MP3. You can run Whisper locally, hit a per-minute API like Deepgram, or use a hosted tool. This bypasses the limit entirely because you're not touching Apple's transcript at all.
2. Pull from YouTube auto-captions. If the show is mirrored to YouTube, yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en drops a .vttyou can reformat. Quality is worse than Apple's and there are no speaker labels, but it's free.
3. Check the publisher's site.Lex Fridman, Tim Ferriss, Acquired, Lenny Rachitsky, and most large podcasts publish the official transcript on their own domain a day or two after release. It's the cleanest source when it exists.
4. Use a bulk tool. What we built. Paste any Apple Podcasts URL into Podscribie and you get speaker-labeled transcripts and AI summaries for the whole show, exportable as Markdown + JSON. Two free per day.

The Apple Podcasts transcript view is a beautifully designedreading surface. It is a deliberately bad extractionsurface. The fastest way to get unstuck is to stop trying to wrestle copy out of it and instead get the transcript from anywhere that doesn't have a 200-word cap.

If the “anywhere” you pick is us, drop a show URL into the homepage and you'll have your first transcript in about twenty seconds. If you want to understand the broader landscape first, we wrote a longer rundown on what still works for copying Apple Podcasts transcripts in 2026.