If it works, kill it.
Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.
I know, I know, using Google apps isn't the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.
Apparently they're moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts aren't implemented yet.
I've moved over to an app from F-Droid.
I don't really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.
I'm still bitter over Inbox.
I used to be excited about new things from Google. Tried to get into every beta, downloaded the newest released apps etc. But not anymore.
I just read about tasks being removed from Google Keep. Then the feature removal from nest hubs. Do they have a unified strategy at all? Or is it just the whims of a manager's daily musings that drive what development does?
Itโs a company culture thing. Youโre not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on "impact". Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren't supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn't always seen as impactful, unless it's a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you're using a free service, you're not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don't drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company -- so decades now.
This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.
In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we've seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming -- they promise!...one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?
Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it's going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.
My god, the assistant, yes. After catching up with Siri it was actually useful. And now it seems all it does is plop whatever you say into a Google search. And since they killed that, too, well...
I think deep down, everybody, including Google, realizes this all ends with them retaining their customer s solely through the blackmail they have accumulated over the years.
Iโm still pissed over the loss of inbox.
They have an agenda, which isn't aligned with your agenda. They only care about profitability, so they kill any projects not supporting that goal. Some projects are created to gather specific data sets about users, and the project is shut down when the data is captured, regardless of how popular the project was. They are always doing something with an ulterior motive. Once you understand that then you won't be mystified by their decisions anymore.
They only care about profitability
It's not even profitability. It's about what looks good on a resume.
New projects look good. Maintaining old projects doesn't.
I've heard a theory that says all the apps and services they make only have the purpose of collecting data. Sort of like limited time experiments. Once they get all they need from one of them they kill it and move on.
Sometimes they pretend to roll a dead service into another product in order to drive customers to that product but it's done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.
It would certainly explain a lot.
I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There's barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)
There's still no better email client than inbox. It was so fucking good
I'm not ready to be reminded of the loss of inbox
Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing "inbox" into the address bar to get to my emails.
Try AntennaPod, it's on F-Droid
One of the best apps on any platform
For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won't or will stop supporting 'legacy' Android Auto apps, so AA dies 'because developers aren't supporting apps anymore -- totally not our fault and we're sorry to see this happen.'
One of my favorite podcast app.
Grabbed AntennaPod from the Play Store. It's been a perfect replacement.
R.I.P.
Tombstone 2018 - 2024 Google Podcasts
Killed 26 days ago, Google Podcasts was a podcast hosting platform and an Android podcast listening app. It was almost 6 years old.
Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
๐คฏ ๐
How else are they gonna half ass implement that into youtube and make that shit bloated af.
It has long form content, Tiktok clone, Main music delivery system, Twitch clone, And now, Podcasts.
๐๐ผ๐๐ผ๐๐ผ
I don't have YouTube Pro or whatever its called now and when I listen to music on my Google home it plays an ad after ever song. Since I have switched to Pihole and blocked googles DNS servers the only ads I get are to buy premium YouTube which I assume are hardcoded into something somewhere.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google's euthanasia project:
The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can't fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it's simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.
It seems like their trying to roll everything into the over media app and subscription
Kind of makes sense, all their other apps are pretty fragmented and crappy.
It also has games now.
I don't think it's rolled out to a lot of people. No one at work can see them except me, but my Google app has games that I can bring up.
I just ignore any new Google service these days. Unreliability isn't even as much of a concern as privacy.
Google music, Google+, Google Spaces, they even killed Google Cache recently - which was a fantastic way to get around my work's brain-dead decision to block the company (including IT) from reaching Reddit.
You would think with the further advancement of humanity, with or without technology we would have more reason to cache and archive things out there whether it's by the written word of paper, the internet or via our phone cameras.
Maybe try Redlib for accessing Reddit. You can also use LibRedirect to automatically redirect Reddit links.
Alternatively, use this guide to create a Cloudflare proxy for any website you want to visit that is blocked
Antennapod?
Fine. I finally installed f-droid, because while I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, I am trying to listen to more, and YT Music is ass for finding new podcasts.
Please give me recommendations for more podcasts that may like based on what I got
Check out Darknet Diaries. High production, in-depth stories on hacking and cyber security. Good for tech-heads and non-tech-heads
Darknet Diaries
TrashFuture is great if you want to be amused/depressed by tech journalist news.
Lions Led By Donkeys is a great war history podcast series.
Neither have ads, which I really value in any podcast. Probably the only reason I don't subscribe to BtB.
Based on Behind The Bastards, check out Knowledge Fight. Dan and Jordan have co-hosted on BtB. They track Alex Jones and Infowars. They're funny and delightful.
Based on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, check out The Unbelievable Truth. Hosted by David Mitchell on BBC Radio 4. Very funny celebrity panel show where they tell outrageous lies about a particular topic, but try to snuggle truths undetected past their opponents. Very funny, and there's years of back catalog to listen to, if you're so inclined.
Our lists are very similar! I also enjoy "stuff the British stole" and "cautionary tales with Jim Hartford"
I don't know about that with Jim Jeffries is one of my go tos. They see how much Jim knows about a given subject and have an expert in the field listening and grading. It's funny z and I've learned a lot from it too.
"Search Engine" is essentially the replacement for Reply All, but with just PJ Vogt. It's really good.
Hi. I listen to half the podcasts on this list. My favorite podcast is oh no! Ross and Carrie they donโt just report on fringe science, spirituality, and claims of the paranormal, but take part themselves. For example, they did a whole series where they joined scientology. They took part in experiments with flatearthers. They go to psychics and then talk about their cold reading techniches etc It's very funny and they are very nice they don't go and try to debunk or whatever. They go with genuine curiosity and skepticism. They are on maximum fun which was recently turned into a co-op, I think that's pretty cool. Other shows I enjoy from max fun are Sawbones, it's about medical history and judge John Hodgman which is more wholesome fun. Another skeptical podcast I enjoy is Skeptoid, it's from another network, and has very short episodes every week. Adam Conover's Factually is also funny and educational
Switched to Antennapod when abandoning Spotify recently. It's been great! Way better interface than Spotify's embarrassingly horrible UI.
Love it!
Been on it for a few years now. It's great.
The only other one I'd really recommend is Podcast Addict. I only switched to Antennapod because it has a little less busy UI.
That or Podcast Republic.
Another vote for Antennapod.
Now that it has **rudimentary Ad-Skipping **
You can set et to skip X seconds in the beginning and Y seconds at the end of each podcast individually.
Maybe one day we will get Sponsor block integration for crowd sourced ad skipping , or AI using the crowd sourced skip points as a guide to fine-tune skipping on device , ( everyone tends to get different length advertisements , depending on targetting or region )
I'm more inclined to not be annoyed too much by ads on podcasts where you know it's just some guy or gal getting compensated for the work they are putting into their podcast. That said, maybe I'm getting way fewer ads on Antennapod because of said adblocking, not sure.
I will say, it has a bug where it will not work in a work profile. You can install it but it won't playback. Which is annoying. But for me it is a small complaint.
You should switch to AntennaPod.
That's my go to, FOSS app that rivals the major apps.
There are other podcast apps on F-Droid also.
Antennapod is fine, although it is annoying that there appears to be no way to make it so that it automatically plays the next episode of the podcast you are listening to rather than what you purposefully place into the que.
I still miss Google reader
You might enjoy feedly
Yeah, this was the only Google product that I really liked, and of course they're killing it just to force people to use YouTube Music. AntennaPod is an open-source alternative that functions very similarly, I've been using it for a couple of months now and I'm very happy with it.
Yeah, that's where I ended up, too. At least Google had the decency to support OPML export so I didn't have to redo my subscriptions manually.
Yeah, that was decent of them. I was expecting some sort of dark pattern bullshit to make exporting to a third-party extra hard, but it was actually pretty simple.
Those features will never be implemented. Just like with Google Music.
Friendly reminder that YouTube music STILL doesn't have the ability to sort songs in a playlist alphabetically
Friendly reminder that YouTube Music laid off an entire team of 43 unionized workers the very moment two of them went before the Austin City Council to ask them to help pressure Google execs to come to the bargaining table to provide them with fair pay and benefits.
I've been using 'Pocket Casts' on Android for years. Highly recommend it.
They finally open sourced the app, but for some reason, they can't figure out how to submit it to F-Droid. This is so annoying.
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
wow what a shit show in the comments
Yeah but that price jump is nuts. I'm sure there's something out there 70% as good for 10% of the price.
I've been plugging it too, but apparently new users have to pay monthly fees to use it? Maybe there are now better alternatives.
Sorry - the data we used to spy on you for through this app, is now available to us by spying on other apps and devices. Its therefore too expensive for us to keep running it when it is no longer necessary
I mean, at some level, how many podcast apps do we need?
But on the other hand, you're fucking Google and this is a glorified RSS feed. Why is it so hard for this company to maintain quality apps? The Google graveyard is filled with so many good ideas.
My problem is when they kill services that are default installations on Android, then never remove them from the OS image.
I'm looking at you Allo.
Plugging Podcast Addict. I don't even use the paid version, but it is awesome!
Been using this one for a decade and it does everything I need it to.
I'm just making sure I live up to its name:
My almost 7,000 hours of podcasts listened through Podcast Addict since 2019 would agree
Same here. Had it for years and it's always been great. Eventually paid for Pro to support them.
PocketCasts is good.
I'm glad they open sourced it, but I'm waiting for an F-Droid release. It seems like they're struggling with this, it took them months and still nothing happened
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
Good app but they got bought and immediately upped their price by a lot from what I recall. It's why I moved on. I think it was a more than 3x price hike in the US and as much as 5x elsewhere.
Shame because their desktop option is tied to that subscription. I couldn't justify paying that much just to swap phone/desktop.
I still use them since i got grandfathered into the pro plan (or whatever its called) without having to pay for a subscription. Not sure if i would pay for it now if i had to.
However, still a really good service for the cost to sync podcasts across lots of devices for anyone who listens to a lot.
Ah, the free plan meets my needs so I didnโt notice the price increase.
google should launch an euthanasia clinic
Will be killed 3 years from now, Google Euthanasia will have been a service to order remote drone assassins for instant palliative relief. Closed due to privacy laws in the EU.
I moved to Podcast Republic, and sometimes AntennaPod, on Android, Downcast on iPhone, and just import the OPML from one of those into gpodder to listen on desktop/laptop.
No accounts or other BS to keep up with, just the latest OPML export. Much nicer, and no one can take it away from me or "shut the service down" in the future.
I second the support for Podcast Republic
I selfhost audiobookshelf for all my podcast needs.
Honestly I already use AntennaPod from F-Droid and with youtube music revanced this might give me some new podcast recommendations.
Podcast Addict is THE feature rich podcast client. A boatload of features and if it doesn't do what you need you request it in the support site.
It has its issues: closed source (if that matters to you), I've read that there are trackers, and ads, but it's still the best podcast app out there, hands down.
I wish it was open source and not filled with trackers
As long as that's the case, I'll definitely continue using AntennaPod
I switch from Google to PA with the first email like this that I got from Google.
I tried maybe 4 alternatives and ended up sticking with PA. I don't really like it...it's most used icons are small and hard to reach, navigation is very unintuitive to me...but basically it sucked less than the other options.
This is exactly why I never started using this app. Not worth investing my time. Still on Pocket Casts for years
I hope they soon figure out their F-Droid release, it's taken them months already
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
This is weird marketing, why not just say "we're merging Google podcast and YouTube music into one app"?
YouTube music is a steaming pile of crap and I hate it.
They're not trying to force everyone to use the alternative product with this message. I think you can export the podcast subscriptions to a number of clients.
Good thing I never started using it! Fuck you Google, Reader, Inbox and Music taught me never to get into your shit again.
Raising a glass To Inbox, we hardly knew ye
Used to use pocket cast instead of this, its great
Pocket Cast is still decent. But they increased the sub prices a lot recently. I was still on an old plan, so I don't know what I'll do when it expires. What bugs me more is podcast releasing exclusively on certain platforms. Congratulations, you just reinvented radio
I memba when a podcast was an mp3 scraped from an rss feed. Enshitification catches all in the end. ๐
I'm grandfathered in to when their premium was a one-time payment, but I'm trying out AntennaPod again as I'd like to stick with open source solutions. I haven't used AntennaPod since 2.4.x and I moved back to Pocket Cast because AntennaPod was giving me a weird issue where the app would occasionally lose audio focus when I paused. I'm hoping I don't run into that issue again, because, other than that, it was every bit as good as Pocket Casts, probably better.
I love being able to arrange by tags, rather than folders.
I went to podcini on f-droid. No ads. Works just like Google podcasts. Even has the play speed thing which I really like.
You got me excited at first, but this is NOT "just like" Google podcasts. This looks like a fork of antennapod, which is fine, but not just like Google podcasts.
It's a fork of AntennaPod, right?
Thanks for the info! Just downloaded it and living it already.
if you've already harvested the data you set out to harvest, stop spending money on the awesome service used to harvest the data
I use Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, but apparently it supports Podcasts too. I haven't tried that feature yet.
It's a self-hosted system that you run on your own server.
So I've been using it on YouTube music and now podcasts suck just as much as when it had Google Music merged.
Now when i just want to listen to my single daily morning podcast, I have to remember to turn the damn thing off because it constantly wants to autoplay random podcasts I have no desire to listen to in the first place. Just ends up throwing my mood off for the day sometimes when it plays some crap that annoys me.
Oh damn, I left Google Podcast on time!
i think its a bit more simple than that
If a product is really good experience for you (ie. Not crammed with ads) AND you dont pay anything for it, then it's not profitable.
Google didnt become one of the biggest companies in the world by doing volunteer work for your benefit
They only exist to show ads and/or harvest your data. Once those goals are met, then the user doesnt matter. They NEVER mattered
I don't think Google Podcasts required that much maintenance. However it didn't have the ads that YouTube Music does.
AntennaPod has been a perfect, free replacement.
Im lazy and use spotify for podcasts but i do plan to stop and use RSS at some point in the future
Podcast Republic is my go to.
Googles antics with its service killing is what lead me to trying out the Apple walled garden.
Now I just need to quit Gmail somehow, sometime.
Worth the $30/year (they have a free tier too)
For email, FastMail and MXRoute are good.
MXRoute needs you to have your own domain, but they let you create unlimited accounts at that domain. You're just limited by total disk space. Sometimes they have good Black Friday deals.
I'd strongly suggest you use your own domain. It means you can easily change provider again in the future while still using the same email address. Get a domain for your surname and give accounts to your family :)
Proton Mail is great, it's privacy-focused and stores all your emails in an end-to-end encrypted format. It even has a feature that let's you easily transfer all your stuff from Gmail or other email providers: https://proton.me/support/easy-switch
Trying to find my podcasts in YouTube Music's Android Auto app took around 8 button presses. Google Podcasts took 0.
I switched to Spotify for podcasts and it still takes 3 or so, but good enough for now.
To be fair, I don't see the point of this app existing when YouTube Music (and, naturallyโby extentionโYTM ReVanced) already has a dedicated podcast section. No need for redundant apps.
I'm with you on this one. it's really easy to go "lol another Google app dead," but this one case I'm ok with. YouTube has become the place for video podcasts. it wasn't something YouTube pushed for, it just naturally happened as the site was well built for it. I used to have to use YouTube for video podcasts and pocket casts for audio. now I can just use YouTube music for both, and I find the UI much better at separating music and podcasts then Spotify.
it's annoying as hell that they don't have basic features in YouTube music yet tho, like mark as played or notifications for new episodes, which is crazy. you can't even search the RSS directory for audio podcasts, you have to manually put in the feed url. it's the Google Play music shutdown all over again. but I still believe the idea of moving audio podcasts to YouTube music makes sense.