Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Luckily, although you might want Google's proprietary music player to access their subscription content, there's absolutely no reason to use a Google podcast app. I am a fan of Antennapod[0], which is available on F-Droid.
You may be surprised at how competent they look internally. If I were a betting man, I'd say each of those transitions went into a promotion/performance packet. I count at least 3 product teams competent at developing podcast features, and were likely rewarded for it.
[0] https://antennapod.org/documentation/general/synchronization
YT Music is absolute garbage for anyone who cares about music. It's impossible to manage a library.
When looking at business leaders, it's best to assume scary competence and that they always know what they're doing. After all, if they weren't impossibly better than us mere mortals, why would the market have granted them such high-paid CEO jobs?
I'm also a Spotify user and despise have podcasts mixed with music, so bloated and clunky (also Spotify performance isn't good), music and podcasts are different usecases for me, I'm on different mood.
I don't want to jump to YouTube Music, and the last time I did a research, I can't find a simple Podcast app that is free, simple, ad-free, and has desktop web+native phone app support like Google Podcasts.
I guess I have to have to pay _other_ subscription now :/. Will try YouTube Music but I'm quite sure will not like it.
Note aside: I have YouTube Premium subscription for the ad-free experience, and has YouTube Music included, but to listen to music I prefer Spotify Premium _only_ because has a desktop app, I just can't have Spotify on my browser tabs, and since I use Firefox I can't install the pwa-webapp. If I can have installed the desktop app/pwa-webapp I'm sure I will dich Spotify for sure. Sorry for the unrelated rant but I just remember that.
I really don't like mixing the two, they have two different use cases imo. Drives me nuts how much Spotify pushes podcasts when I just want to listen to some tunes.
It's also interesting because the normal optimizations like caching don't apply to licensing fees. At first I was going to suggest that they can cache frequently played songs to save cost, but then I realized that has no impact on royalty fees derived from playtime.
I wholly agree however, that mixing music and podcasts in one app is stupid though!
If by any chance you’re an Apple person, I’d recommend Overcast. It’s a measly $10 or so per year for ad-free but really, anything free is going to either have ads or be tied to some annoying larger monetization strategy like Apple or Google have. So I don’t think it’s worth putting “free” in your criteria.
Maybe I should try other chromium-based browser just for that, but also don't feel to have logged in my Google Account in other browser (if YTM has a desktop native app will be similar haha but IDK), hope Firefox desktop at some point support PWA installations. And maybe I'm old, but for products that I interact all day (spotify, figma, slack) I just like native desktop apps detached from browsers, even if they are Electron apps which are essentially a webapp wrapper.
About the Overcast suggestion, I'm a Windows/Ubuntu/Android person, I guess Overcast isn't for me, but I'm willing to pay $10/year for a product like Google Podcasts, I will look for products soon.
Also, Google Podcasts is free and ad-free, I never even see a promoted podcasts or something like that. But than can be one reason why Google shut it down. Google Keep is similar, simple, free and ad-free, I love it, hope they don't shut it down!
It sounds like you just want to rant?
This announcement is quite frustrating elsewhere, since we have no idea how good or bad YTM is for Podcast
With all due respect, it's probably relevant to other people.
This change means X number of people need to go looking for some alternative, and given Google’s lack of ability to keep any product alive long-term besides Gmail, YouTube, and Search, YTM should arguably be the absolute last one on your list to consider, since we all know it (or its podcast section) will be replaced with something else within the next five years, just like nearly every Google product.
But I've wanted to switch to a more open option so I'll have to figure those things out elsewhere.
I suppose they can get away with all of this because the concept of competing for a customer doesn't really exist at Google. They can toy around without any consequences because they have a money printer.
Also, at Google's current size, anything producing less than 1B in revenue per month is frankly not that interesting. Small stuff.
There was no strong disincentive for pulling the plug on products without paying customers.
For the past few years, they've been trying to 'correct' that and in the process pissing everybody off.
I guess I'm not helping but I literally can't for many podcasts now.
> Maybe you should try using a less hostile app?
Great advice.
If I need a proprietary app to access a show's feed, then IMHO it should not be considered a podcast (and I refuse to listen to it).
That being said, I remain cautiously optimistic about the podcasting ecosystem. A huge number of high-quality shows remain freely available (and many shows sustain an independent revenue stream). Despite the creeping centralization, podcasting still feels very independent when compared to things like Youtube/Tiktok.
What about the Spotify app keeps you using it, even though (1) they're a parasitoid on the open podcasting ecosystem and (2) have successfully destroyed the original, open meanings of "podcast" and "podcasting"?
https://antennapod.org/ is incredible! 10/10, highly recommend!
It's preinstalled on Android. Easy to get started... Defaults are a powerful thing.
Thanks for the recommendation! I was just looking for another app to switch to.
I just happen to still have my notes where I was evaluating players a while back and here's why I chose Podcast Addict over AntennaPod, with this written from the perspective of "why not AntennaPod"
* auto download should be configurable per podcast, ideally with number of episodes to retain
* auto skip intro, outro seconds should be configurable per podcast
* delete from Queue view doesn't remove it from the queue nor even mark it as played
* ui treatment makes currently playing overlap with the played marker on queue items
* bamboo menu for an episode should offer delete
* delete and remove from queue doesn't clear it from the now playing bar
* it should stop after episode if sleep timer is active <-- this one is a solid, 100% deal breaker for any app that doesn't support it
PA is slanted way to heavily towards the power user. I just want to see my feed chronologically, pick one and hit play.
Unless there's some setting I am missing, I think it doesn't let you search for podcast episodes and then play them without subscribing to a podcast. In that respect, Google podcasts is better.
Though conceptually it's still just weird. A video that I like on youtube because of the video component isn't necessarily a song I want to listen to as music. Also it really needs the ability to block music from certain artists.
If you're not the first pioneering version of something, you better be doing everything the others are doing, but better. Otherwise, what's the point of your product?
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.
I migrated my account too, since I have YT Premium anyway, but I don’t even know if that’s a feature anymore or how to access that aspect of my library, like, to add new songs from MP3s I own.
The forced deathmarch to YouTube Music and its advertisement hell was a massive "fuck you" for trusting Google to at least not be assholes if you're buying items from them. I had a huge library of music purchased on Play and nothing worked to backup/download them. All the purchases disappeared in YouTube Music. Google "support" with the issues was... exactly what you would expect.
I didn't get into podcasts until a few years ago during the pandemic. But I refused to ever consider touching Google Podcasts. On the one hand with Google you know the entity you're dealing with so there's a certain ease that the name has vs trusting a different company. But increasingly it's just not worth it. They're like an elephant grazing on the savanna and you're a dung beetle. You can often find that Google shit is usable and useful, but they won't even notice if they step on you. I avoid Google if I can avoid it.
What kind of dysfunctional company deathmarches its users like this between two competing brands and products right in its own company, and is so committed to doing it wholesale that it's willing to mass-lose customers as well as features? The kind that puts its internal politics and product manager's careers and ideas ahead of customers' needs.
For at least a year after the transition you couldn't chromecast from YouTube Music on the web. The internal buganizer ticket on the matter was a shitshow. No accountability for the fact that we were killing something that worked and replacing with something that didn't even work with our own products.
Likewise, YTM on Android Auto was a similarly terrible backwards step in user interface and capabilities. It's been some years so I forget what irked me, but there was a laundry list of them.
At one point there were I think 3 Google product places where you could play podcasts; YTM, GPM, and Google Podcasts. None talking with each other about subscriptions, etc.
That and the whole idea of meshing a video recommendation system with a music recommendation system was just busted. My kids watched Minecraft or whatever videos on YouTube on the family (Android) TV So I started getting recommendations in YTM for video game music and what not.
The entire orientation of YouTube is around various random clips and the like. A music service like Spotify or (RIP) GPM is about albums and singles and EPs. YouTube's whole recommendation model wasn't built for it, IMHO.
GPM had a good recommendations engine. YTM pushed top 40 crap on me. I tried to tune it, but it failed.
I'd ask my Google display assistant device (I worked on them and had a couple around the house) to play some music, and it would spool up and start playing a video on YouTube instead. Because clearly that's what I'd want.
Harmonizing product lines and concentrating efforts and changing brands around etc is entirely reasonable. But you don't do it in a way that drops features and pisses off customers. You do it carefully and with respect. The way this played out was ... YouTube organization "won", Google Play team "lost."
I gave up, cancelled my sub, and bought Spotify.
> Podcasts in YouTube Music will be available regardless of whether you have a YouTube Premium subscription.
> The company notes that all users can listen to podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, and while casting
youtube.com/podcasts
They don't have RSS feeds or even audio file support. If you're a podcaster, you have to take your audio files and add a still image or audiogram to turn it into a video, then upload _that_.
> YouTube Music is not available in your area
Using a Google app, and investing any time whatsoever is a waste as it will be gone 6 months to 2 years down the road.
Seems like brutal PR to me, but they can get away with it.
It sounds like the service launches and shutdowns are incentivized anyway based on what other commenters are saying, so that would explain it.
Follow the money!
Apple just finished UNbundling everything from one monolithic app, now people want it back?
Different use cases. Different audio mediums. Different apps.
Creating something new and half-baked is what promo packets are made of!
Frankly, the Overcast app is one of the main things attracting me to iOS at this point, and a dearth of good native podcast clients is hurting the Pixel/Google ecosystem
It's now owned by Automattic (of Wordpress.com and tumblr) and the clients are open source
My main bug bear is how how some screens are drawers and some screens are pages which makes navigation confusing. Even after years of use, I still keep accidentally closing the drawer screens when trying to scroll and trying to navigate backwards which isn't allowed. Please... just make them all pages so they behave consistently with the same navigation and gestures.
Google Play Music (2011 - 2020)
Google Podcasts (2018 - 2024)
Before the podcast-hype one could simply share the direct-link to the audio-file.
Now all you get are links which require Google/Apple/Spotify to open.
(But realistically, I don't know who would be willing to drive this. It would need backing from at least Google/Apple/Spotify to maintain a central catalogue, and the incentive seems to be low...)
Whether each individual episode is a separately entity (like, with a distinct URI or whatever) within that format, I don't know.
Ideal would be an URI like podcast:// which apps could simply register for on OS-level, but I frankly don't know which entity would actually want to drive such a standardization.
No, that would be far from ideal, for the same reason that the feed[1] URI scheme was flawed (cooked up by very confused people) from the beginning. And among other things, a podcast:// URI would now mean I can't open the thing in my browser unless my browser vendor adds support and I download the new version.
The file is served over HTTP(S). Just use the http or https URI. Podcast players need to do their part[2] in dealing with them.
There's nothing stopping this from happening today except for app developers not putting any UI for it in their apps. HTTP has a Link header (which servers should already be sending, whether apps actually do anything with it or not), RSS has a field to link to pages, HTML has `link` elements (and the `rel` attribute for `a` elements) to link back to the file, and audio file containers of course let people include metadata.
So linking to a podcast episode is as simple in principle as giving someone a URL directly to the file or the associated episode page. (It's a URL. That's it. Done.) It's getting application authors and server operators to do their part, though, which is another matter.
The only way to fix it is mark the newly-started episode as played, then mark as unplayed. So many extra steps that shouldn’t even be necessary in the first place.
Great...
Remember kids, never build anything onto Google.
Seriously, it's sad that they broke their reputation on this, but the writing was on the wall from day zero. If you're an Android user, I recommend BeyondPod (http://www.beyondpod.mobi/android/index.htm): it's simple, it's reliable, it integrates to a search engine, and it also supports pasting in links with authentication so you can get any Patreon exclusive feeds you have access to (something that, to my knowledge, Google Podcasts was never able to support).
Google Podcasts is so simple it could even have been an open source reference app showcasing Flutter and some backend GCP services.
Same reason Reader got killed.
Nobody wants to work on that.
Google Podcasts is simple to use, one thing made with a clear, specific purpose, with an easy to use interface. They should keep it just to improve their brand recognition. But no... YouTube Music it is.
Could for the life not understand back then why Youtube and this existed at the same time.
It make sense - move all consumer content under the Youtube brand - hopefully the teams working on these products don't have the same "I got to start a new team to launch another shitty duplicated product in order for top management to notice and promote us.
The folks working on Youtube are doing great work even if most Googlers higher up might think it is so mundane and boring - it pays the bills.
When the rumors of Google Podcasts being killed started circulating, I added podcast support to my app. In many cases matching or doing better than the Google Podcasts in terms of useful features.
A podcast I grab everyday and keep until I've listened.
Your link seems to mostly talk about uploading and managing it myself. I'm guessing podcasts don't actually work like this?
Sorry the unclear description. I'll fix it.
YT Music seems to be where Google Media apps shift their users to when they retire.
--
Must be fun to be on that dev-team:
"We have a new high-priority ticket: Add podcast-support to inherit users from podcast app. Ok, so I guess we move the 'Compete with Spotify/AppleMusic' stories back to the funnel"
But Google device, playing Google podcast and it ALWAYS RESUMES even when I try all sorts of verbal command iterations (play latest, play todays episode, etc)
I would suggest that anybody creating their own media hosts this in a variety of locations, and not rely on a single point of failure.
How do I subscribe to Podcasts on an Android phone now?
Google Podcasts is still around until next year, and the Youtube Music app will have that functionality added this year. It's all in the first paragraph.
They said the same thing with Google Play Music, and never added the same functionality to YT music, which is massively inferior for everything besides discovering new music
The inability of big services (EG, google, apple) to monopolize or gatekeep podcasting relates directly to their failure to make money.(1) the protocol's minimal snooping options relates to the failure to implement digital adtech... and to the lack of good discovery/recommendation services. The unique freedom capabilities podcasting seems to have. The barriers(2) to entry... all so interlocked.
Spotify's big money attempt to make money off podcasting is/was all about buying exclusivity. Paying big podcasters (eg rogan) to remove their podcast from other players... podcasts spotify already had free access to. Not shocking or surprising, but instructive. They very big money... more than anyone would likely invest on podcasting proper.
The market panic when netflix realised it was in a competitive market with price pressure from both consumers and producers because competition. How are you supposed to have 50% profit margins like that! Google would rather walk away from a market than concede anything short of full price setter mode on either end.
There's this point where Peter Thiel and Karl Marx are finishing each other's sentences and drinking Rum. I'm starting to think that point is a certain type of prevailing market condition. The rest is derivative.
"Google says it plans on further increasing its investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music and making it more of a destination for podcast fans with features focused on discovery, community, and switching between audio podcasts and video. The latter is something rival Spotify has also"
Anyone remember the "HD video race?" Online video was obviously a big thing. Bandwidth & quality were big problems receding as fast as broadband expanded. Google had an in-house video hosting service. They bought youtube. Other services still existed. Google effin plowed forward. They smoked everyone with their ability to implement HD streaming at massive scale. No one could keep up.
Now Google's PR statements refer to breakthrough features like "backgrounding video" as a multi-year effort to reach feature parity with spotify. oy.
Google can successfully do many things. The are capable of making excellent products. I think they're also capable of making many more economically viable products. However... the enormous profit margins they enjoy make anything short of monopoly pointless.
(1)Google literally sell ads on those same podcasts via youtube. (2) At some point, "barrier to entry" goes negative. Early blogging tech lowered barriers to entry. Referring to modern social media's "barriers" feels like discussing the "challenge" of eating caramel popcorn dusted with coke.
That miss was what pushed me to google podcast in the first place, along with their absolute refusal to fix broken feeds for existing podcasts in their index.
The UI might not be as good. I guess we’ll see.
Especially considering how migration from Google Music to YT Music went.
Personally despite looking to get into podcasts I ended up writing off Google Podcasts from the start, expecting it will stop working just like Listen did.