Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now, a new support article details Google’s plans to kill the product, with a shutdown coming in April 2024.
I think all the core podcast features exist somewhere, but they are buried in several menus.
There are more podcast-centric features sequestered away in YouTube Music, where a button with the very confusing label “Save to library” will subscribe to a podcast feed.
Music is a different interface, site, and app, so none of these billions of YouTube viewers are seeing these podcast features.
But this is the future of Google’s podcast content, so the company is plowing ahead with it.
If you’re looking to get off Google’s wild ride and want something straightforward that works across platforms, I recommend Pocket Casts.
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For anyone getting this news here. On Android, one of the best replacements is AntennaPod.
I have a lifetime membership with PocketCasts, but I don’t know if I’d chose it today with the subscription. A few months ago, they shipped a buggy version and I temporarily switched to AntennaPod and was considering staying.
AntennaPod and was considering staying.
How do you deal with multi OS support?
Podcast Addict is not quite as streamlined, but has many more features.
My favorite feature is the “Automatic Rewind” combined with “Incremental rewind”. It adds a rewind everytime you pause and resume an episode that increases the longer the podcast has been paused. It means that if I briefly pause, for example to respond to. Some one in real life talking to me, then it will automatically rewind 5 seconds when I start the podcast again, so I can hear the sentence I was in the middle of in full. But if I leave a podcast alone for a week, then it will rewind 1 minute so I can get fully back into the context of what I was listening to.
I have used this for years now. It’s really great. I have it set to skip the first 7 minutes of only certain podcasts because they usually have 7 - 8 minutes of ads. I also have it skip silences, which speeds up listening more than I first thought it would.
Podcast Addict is exactly the kind of app I wish were in vogue again. Rather than dropping features and hiding options in a race to be “streamlined”, it’s a properly designed piece of software in the classic sense: its a tool first and foremost. It prioritizes usability first, aesthetics second, and gives you all the buttons and levers to make it your own.
Like, it’s the kind of app where if you’re using it and think “eh I don’t like this one thing”, if you look in the settings, there’s probably a way to turn it off. God damn what I wouldn’t give for this to be common place design philosophy again.
Dev is really cool and responsive, too.
What you describe is also a feature of AntennaPod.
Edit: AntennaPod is also open source.
Awesome! I actually downloaded Antenna Pod to compare, but I can’t seem to find this setting, could you point it out to me?
I’m a big fan of Podcast Republic. Great dev, feature-rich, and a much improved UI from when I first started using it.
I love Pocket Casts. Sadly I have a hard time recommending it to new people since they switched to subscription model payment. The reason I love it is because of what it was, not what it is. I’m grandfathered into the "pay once, own forever"and if I wasn’t I would probably be using something else these days. I’m still gonna throw it in as a recommendation though, because it’s damn good and people should make up their own minds in whether it is worth the payment.
I use the free tier and it is very good. Does everything I need. I won’t pay for a subscription for a podcast app, so it’s shame I can’t buy it to show my appreciation.
In any case, the free tier is really good.
I don’t mind their subscription model. All the subscription features – cloud storage, folders, desktop app, extra themes – really feel like bonus features that aren’t essential.
I guess. I don’t know what I would do without the desktop app and the cloud storage though. I just log in somewhere and everything is synced up and working.
I went to download it, and apparently I already had! Now to start subscribing to everything again…bleh.
I feel like podcasts and their apps is what TV and movies should be.
Users pick the app they want to use. They optionally pay a fee or not. The app has any and all TV, Movies, music, etc. they want. In the back end, media rights holders have a pre-defined revenue split agreement.
It’s like federated media.
I tried AntennaPod but went back because of Android Auto. I just found this showing how to get AntennaPod on AndroidAuto!
Lmao. I’m shocked.
Google killing a product? No way
They didn’t market this very well. Literally the first time I’m hearing about this
