Google Podcasts service shuts down in the US next week | Hacker News Reader

Google Podcasts service shuts down in the US next week

bleepingcomputer.com

51 pointsmarban46 comments

I wish someone would ask Sundar Pichai in an interview or something if he is aware of the damage that these constant shutdowns do to his company's reputation.

Not because I am interested in interrogating him. But because I'm honestly curious about his thinking process. Does he know and not care? Does he not know? Either way the answer would be interesting to me.

Spotify does music and podcasts in one app. Why should Google have two different apps for music and podcasts?

Because discovery, consumption, and metadata are completely different for both mediums. Part of the reason Apple has a separate app for classical music.

because a lot of people hate how spotify has the same app for music and podcasts

You can do both in one, but it's difficult to get right (which is usually true of combining things into one product). E.g. when I tried it in Spotify, I couldn't find a way to return to where I was in my podcast after listening to music. Every single time I wanted to listen to my podcast after listening to any music, I had to manually scroll through hundreds of episodes until I saw the green checkmarks appear, then scroll back up slowly to find the last one I was listening to. Even if there is a feature for this, I couldn't find it on Android, which is its own UX problem.

More importantly, YouTube music simply doesn't have a lot of podcasts. I started transferring my stuff over, and immediately found it was missing multiple podcasts I was listening to. Kind of a huge deal breaker.

i like spotify for music & music discovery but trying to manage and track podcasts felt too disorganized. i like pocket casts instead.

I could be OK with that, except that YouTube Music is an awful podcast player. It doesn't have a way to queue up episodes. Also listening to podcasts severely degrades the music experience, the interface intermixes the music and podcasts too much.

> Spotify does music and podcasts in one app.

and it's super fucking annoying. my kingdom for the ability to tell Spotify I WILL NEVER LISTEN TO A PODCAST

Spotify’s podcast player sucks too the only reason I would ever use it would be to listen to a Spotify exclusive podcast, none of which I care about

And now offers learning courses!

Spotify doesn’t do either well. It’s getting to the point where I’m considering dropping my family Spotify plan.

By contrast, Apple Music just works.

What does Apple Music do better than Spotify in the music space?

It plays music and doesn't get in your way. Currently, Spotify:

* Has intermixed music with Podcasts

* Cannot manage a queue properly. Going forward and backward random just plays completely unrelated songs (ran into this one tonight with my kids)

* Displays full-screen pop-up ads

* Randomly fails to play sound, despite showing the song playing

* Completely forgets recently played songs

* Barfs an insane amount of junk at me in the home screen

* An AI DJ that is completely garbage. Playing essentially random junk.

* Emails me a bunch of spam

* Pushes music videos, despite having no interest

* Is completely, 100% useless if you turn explicit mode off (I have young kids)

Well, you’ve obviously have put some thought into this, even if subconsciously. I would like to just add that not only was the ai dj terrible but I would always just hear the same songs over and over. I never count but seems like a handful of songs would be in every play list 8/10 times.

Haha, yes. I've put too much thought into it :P

> I never count but seems like a handful of songs would be in every play list 8/10 times.

I've joked with my wife that the AI is really just whatever songs are going to generate the most revenue for Spotify.

For me, it alternates between:

* Cutting off a series of good songs too quickly

* Playing the exact same 4 songs in a cluster

* The DJ telling me "I love these songs", then proceeding to play songs I have literally (1) never listened to (2) have skipped repeatedly in the past few weeks.

It's also fun that it can't figure out me playing sleepy time music for hours and hours on occasion is not indicative of me actually enjoying that music.

Spotify doesn’t “do” podcast at all. I can’t just put an RSS feed into the Spotify app and subscribe to it.

Whatever Spotify is doing. It’s a horrible excuse for a podcast player even compared to Apple’s podcast app and that’s saying a lot. At least with Apple’s podcast app, I can subscribe to any podcast if I know its URL.

I use Overcast for what it’s worth - not Apple’s podcast app.

I think you would get an answer that implies not caring. Pichai is a former Wharton and McKinsey guy, his job description is "provide value to shareholders" and cutting products and headcount does just that. I share your frustration, I hope we one day find a way to move past this brand of business management.

This is purely to minimize monopoly accusations. Unless the product is making google billions in profit, it's not worth the risk to google. Podcasts is maybe hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but if regulators found evidence of google using Search or Android to give Podcasts an unfair advantage, it could give them the ammo to split Google up. Microsoft was almost sliced up due to Internet Explorer, not very different.

If it even were just a clean shutdown!

The newest Google trend is to move features around between apps and (presumably) across the org chart.

Looking at Google Pay/Android Wallet/Android Pay/Pay/Google Pay (old), Duo/Google Meet (old)/Google Meet/Google Meet (part of Gmail) and others.

Obviously he’s aware; it would be too hard for it not to come up given how often it’s posted on social media. The mistake you make is belief Google is in the same business as our little web apps; making money to live.

No. Google’s goal is preserve and grow the wealth and power its investors have over society. That means bleeding edge not bothering with 20 year old pop culture obsessions.

Yes it was probably mostly FUD. But you can’t imagine the number of sales calls I sat on when I worked at AWS ProServe where I heard them talk to customers about how they couldn’t trust GCP to keep a new service around and used their history of abandoning products as evidence.

> I wish someone would ask Sundar Pichai in an interview or something if he is aware of the damage that these constant shutdowns do to his company's reputation.

I bet he would like to ask you if you are aware of how little damage a bad reputation does to the company's money.

Ehh. It accumulates. Shutting down IoT is something companies remember when they rely upon you to be stable. Or shutting down domains which was a value add to their platform.

Stadia’s death was predicted in its crib because everyone expected Google could not follow through on the idea (from the outside, it does appear Google treated the adopters decently after the shutdown). These actions lead to a death spiral. Why should I invest in a doomed platform?

The lack of ability of Google to commit to a specific length of time that they'd commit to Stadia for was baffling. If they'd just say we're going to commit to stadi for the length of the NES console generation or something, then it becomes a straight business calculation - compare x to y, where x is cost to port + on going maintenance, vs Y, expected sales over a known time period. everything has a lifespan, we don't go around telling each other we're doomed, just because one day we'll all eventually die.

I can only chuckle when I read things like this. There was another post on the homepage today talking about how podcasts in general are still growing in popularity. But Google fumbled the bag yet again!

There's some consolidation here. Podcast support in YouTube music is a real thing.

There is SO much overlap between YouTube Music videos and listening to music. There is also overlap between YouTube podcasts and listening to podcasts.

Trying to align here makes a lot of sense. Tricky to pull off, sure, but it's not a dropped ball.

There are many podcasts that exist on Google podcasts but aren’t listed on YouTube music. Maybe around 20% of my podcast collection doesn’t exist on YouTube music; and they aren’t fringe podcasts either. Many are very mainstream. This makes YouTube music an inadequate replacement

You can directly add podcasts by their feed URL. They don't have to be on YouTube music. The discovery for such podcasts is non-existent, though.

Consolidating products makes sense to an engineer, but in general companies seek to create many redundant brands to confuse the market. For example Faceboot+Instagram, or how entire store aisles are filled as a simulation of more choices than just P&G and J&J.

Honestly, at this point I hope the shut down most of the company. They tried to do everything, but ultimately they just showed that their corporate structure couldn't scale to that many employees.

It's rarely mentioned, but a major casualty of the Reader shutdown was Google Listen, a perfectly good podcast app which I think was just somebody's side project. It used Reader as a backend, so you could also manage your feeds in a browser. Really cool.

It's just another example of Google failing to even keep their options open to take advantage of future developments. "Serial" would make podcasts mainstream just a year or so later.

I'm breaking up with google next year. Can't wait to be free of their crap.

Next year, why then? Genuinely curious what keeps you hanging on. Seems like Google’s apps and services rise and fall like the tides, so why not now.

I've degoogled quite well, the only real google services I continue to voluntarily use are YouTube and Maps. Although I don't use YouTube itself, I mostly interact with it through third party apps (i.e SmartTube or Invidious) and with Maps... well... nothing comes close. I wish there was a decent competitor to Google Maps but there isn't. I tried using Apple Maps but it lacks all of the crowdsourced information that Google has access to.

Even with Google Maps, I find the UX of Apple Maps to be superior.

The worst part is how when you’re on a trip and move to another app and back, Google Maps will wait 5-10 secs before showing you the trip you’re literally on. Instead it prioritises the unwanted “what’s on” box.

I’ll use Google Maps for reviews, and Apple Maps for everything else.

It’s hard to break away. So many businesses and nonprofits using Google calendar, drive, and online apps like sheets.

I already had Youtube Music and their podcast integration seems better than Google Podcasts but this probably is a pain if you don't have youtube music or can't easily export followed podcasts.

The date was announced in December already.

Is there some new information here, or are we simply re-litigating Google for this decision because hating them is the thing to do now?

AntennaPod is better than Google Podcasts.

I was upset until I switched, and then glad I got pushed to switch.

Pocketcast is my fav

AntennaPod is what I moved to. I miss having the built-in sync between devices that I had with Google Podcasts, but AntennaPod is otherwise great.

Did you export your subscription or queue from GP? They promised this in Dec23.

I was a late comer to podcasts, and i just liked the clean GP design.

Ah yes, Youtube Music, the logical home for, hm, audio-only spoken word content.

I think I'll just read, erm, sorry, Play Books instead. (But not music, because that's on Youtube now as well.)

Until they shut down Play Books while educating us that customers actually prefer summaries via Gemini instead of using Play Books, so actually now book purchases are being migrated to Gemini because that is such a better customer experience. It can even contextually recommend further reading... why would you not want that?

They could at least foster some goodwill by releasing the source

Google is so lost.

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