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Comment by JeremyNT | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how incompetent they seem in this area. They even shut down another podcast app before your journey began, called Google listen.

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.

[0] https://antennapod.org/

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> t's amazing how incompetent they seem in this area

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.

The only successful products I can think of from Google that were entirely of their own making are Google Search, GMail, and Chrome. Their other successes all came from acquisitions, like YouTube, Maps (KeyHole), Docs (Writely), Android, etc. They deserve some credit for their cultivation and maintenance of these products, but they did not create them.

Chrome was based on Webkit, which I think was associated with the K Desktop Environment project.

Webkit is a fork of KHTML (part of Konqueror from KDE) created by Apple.

Their main product is ads

And to their credit, they are remarkably good at projectile vomiting that garbage all across the internet

And the acquisition of Doubleclick was very helpful for that product...

Give product team competent at maintaining podcast features ( o ´ ･ _ ･ ) っ

Oh man, wait until you hear how incompetent they are at messaging apps.

And health apps

And TV apps - Google TV, Android TV, YouTube TV.

The one thing they got right was Chromecast. And they ruined it with a stupid remote and interactive UI while still using underpowered hardware. I use a Shield TV now.

benefit of google podcasts compared to antennapod is that with google podcasts I can start a podcast on one device and later continue where I left off on another device (e.g. listen on mobile then switch to desktop).

I don't use this functionality myself and can't vouch for it, but have you looked into the synchronization options? It seems as if it should be possible. They support self-hosting as well. [0]

[0] https://antennapod.org/documentation/general/synchronization

thanks. gPodder seems to be the missing piece.

That's much better than Google Podcasts, thanks!

This must be the first time those words have been used in that order. I suspect possibly also the last.

Antennapod is the a major reason why I haven't moved to an iPhone.

Antennapod is also available on Android.

F-Droid is an Android app store, yes. You can install it on every Android device.

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