My last job was all on the Google ecosystem. They bought like 10 of these things and to be honest, they were a blast during Meetings, but that was pre-covid. Pandemic really effed the office and pushed everyone remote, and I think they were lying around gathering dust when I left.
I’ll pour one out for Google Podcasts. I eventually settled on it because it was free, cross-platform, and also kept my podcast life separate from my music library or YouTube views. If you’re a multi-ecosystem home and don’t want your podcast stuff with your music, it really was the best option.
And I definitely won’t be going to YouTube Music with them. I don’t even want my music habits commingling with my YouTube habit and getting recommendations that are just music videos for months.
Google podcast used to be my goto podcast app. I really liked that it was ad-free and you could download to listen during your commute. This offline listening feature didn't work properly on Spotify. I will miss google podcast.
As a point of order, AntennaPod doesn't "have" any podcasts; they're all publicly available in a web standard RSS format, so you can get those podcasts on any podcast aggregator/player like Overcast, Podcast Addict, or (my personal favorite) Pocket Casts. In that vein, I recommend choosing your podcast player based on features, not availability.
I tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only 'podcast' I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.
With Google Podcasts, they'd load in with a "Welcome to the Critical Role podcast" intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front... I didn't bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?
I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does... no ads.
Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.
When Google Podcasts launched it was a bad joke, and I was already using Google Play Music for podcasts when they removed the feature. It was basically the same cycle Google is repeating now, and has done to their messaging and music apps.
So I gave Google Podcasts a day to try it, and switched to Podcast Addict.
Podcast Addict would have been my favorite except they didn't store your subscriptions anywhere. Every time I got a new phone I would have to manually look up and subscribe to around 100 podcasts. I may revisit it once Google Podcasts stops working. Also got AntennaPod and Pocket Cast to try.
I will never - NEVER - forgive them for shutting down Google Reader. That’s the closest I’ve come to cutting everything Google out of my life, and I’m still salty about it today.
Google is killing off so many products lately we need to do a roundup or we won't get anything else done today.
YouTube has been slowly consuming all of Google's media properties, and podcasts completes the trinity along with videos (both amateur and scripted Hollywood content) and music.
This was announced on the official YouTube blog, if there was any question about the responsible party.
In 2024, Google Podcasts will die at 8 years old, if you want to count from the weird Google Search beginnings, but only has had the bare minimum feature set of a podcast service for four years.
If you've never heard of this, that's because it got a very small rollout to only Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
You can throw this shutdown into the pile of "Google price increases" this year.
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