Google announces April 2024 shutdown date for Google Podcasts
Google announces April 2024 shutdown date for Google Podcasts
Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service.
Google killing a product? No way
Who did they kill?
Nah they done it before with chat
Your sarcasm detector requires calibration.
fuck it, do gmail next, force me to find a proper provider
who exactly thinks it's good that things are this ephemeral? what's the point of even using and enjoying and getting invested in something when they constantly pull this shit?
Gmail is too valuable a source of advertising data
In other words, Google won't kill what they can use to harvest your data.
Proton mail!
Proton's legit
I mean, before Gmail, I had a new email address every 2-3 years. I've had Gmail for what, almost 20 years? That's not what I'd define as "ephemeral."
Finding an alternative is the easy part. You can get yourself a domain on Namecheap, and get an email attached to it for pennies.
Issue is that a lot of services out there don't consider alternative email providers as valid. Some as a protective measure against spam, some because... fuck knows why, honestly
Another day another piece of Google tech tossed in the trash
Google: Wanna see me create another great app and space then do no advertising and deep 6 it like, well whenever. wanna see it again?
they are like the bad version of valve with their IPs.
Tip: just don't use Google products
Ty I was gonna post that link lmao
I was looking for you "OMG GOOGLE IS KILLING EVERYTHING!" people. They don't have infinite money, stuff costs money to run and if it isn't as popular as their other services obviously they'd shut it down. People use their products for free (monetarily) for years and then bitch and complain when something gets shut down, never having paid a cent.
Every single thing I use gets changed, ruined, shut down, canceled, moved, merged. It never ends.
Wound up giving up and using Google podcast BECAUSE other ones I used kept getting shut down.
Pocket Casts has been reliable for me for years. I don't even use their pro features, but I pay anyway because it's so cheap. Highly recommended.
I will never shut up about pocket casts. Their multi-device sync is wonderful. I can pick up where I left off on any episode from any of their apps. They've even got a pretty decent UWP app that I use on my Windows installs. They also have rock solid Chromecast support.
I loved it so much I bought the lifetime pass a long time ago. At any rate, I can't recommend pocket casts enough!
Another great app for podcasts I can recommend is Podcast Addict. Free and it's full of great features.
Supported!
Cheap? Unless someone snagged Pocketcasts when it was still a one off payment app, it is NOT cheap. Heck, I can pay for YouTube Premium, Spotify Premium and still have money left for one more streaming service to plug into before I hit what Pocketcasts wants me to pay. The app is good but it is the very antithesis of cheap.
Thank you for ideas to look into.
Way of the world. At least the churn of enshitification means we get some new good stuff for a little while.
FFS Google's killing another app I use all the time
At this rate I half expect Google Play books to be dead before 2025
YouTube Podcasts coming to the YouTube Music app delivered to you by the Google Play game delivery app!
I buy all my ebooks on Google Play and then export them via ACSM converter and back it up (you can only convert and exported file once)
I'll never forgive them for killing iGoogle. I missed my start page so much...
Selfhost Audiobookshelf
I'll have to check this out for sure as I primarily listen to audiobooks rather than reading physical books or reading ebooks
They're just so much more convenient with my shitty work schedule
10 Google: We’re so rich! Let’s make a product!
20 Google: kills product
30 goto 10
You forgot major adoption and promotion for all parties involved.
That's why I never used it, because I knew it will happen. Better to use some other solution. I wish there was a third party option to google chromecast and all the home devices that works as well.
I can't speak for the rest of the home products, but Roku is a pretty good alternative to Chromecast
Pocketcasts is great and supports Chromecast
Thanks, I know.
Lmao. I'm shocked.
Never rely on Google apps.
The end.
What's a good alternative to Google maps? I'm getting sick of it.
Another service that I didn't know google even offered until they announced it was dying. There are so many sources that podcast apps can pull from that we don't need half as many as we have.
I actually really enjoy it. It's my go to no frills podcast app that isn't paired with music or other extra stuff
Podcasts are just mp3s (or whatever other audio format like ogg). Authors/pod casters should just host them on their site and be done with it. Why let some other company take a lion share of your ad profit. We need less centralized services and more distributed services. Use lemmy or mastodon to promote them. :)
There is value in aggregate discoverabilty via these sites. They also post to all of them not just one. Podcast advertising is dying across the board.
I use it, I like it and it works with zero issues. It also easily works with my Google Home speaker. So of course it gets shut down. Because obviously. Sigh.
That said, Pocket Casts on iOS is also quite decent.
Same I pivoted to PocketCasts
Pocket Casts has both an Android and iOS version. If you pay for their "subscription" their web app also works, though I've never used it I've heard good things.
Odd, I use the same on mobile and max hub and find they only sync on way. If I listen to one on the hub I have to manually remember where I left off.
They say it's crazy YouTube could end. I'm not so sure.
I don't think they have any qualms about shutting down YouTube but I think they're afraid of the backlash. It's such a unique treasure trove of cultural significance that is not out of the question for the US government to step in and tell them to put at least some of it in the Library of Congress or to work with other organizations to preserve it. And they'd rather let it run than be bothered.
I've heard a theory that says that Google isn't interested in any of their products for the product's sake. They're all data-gathering experiments. Once they're done mining that particular kind of data they shutter the project. If they ever need to revisit that category later, they make another similar product.
It would certainly explain why they shut down certain projects in the face of commercial success, or why they keep revisiting the messenger app over and over in different ways.
It would also explain their inept attempts at monetizing YouTube. Keeping an experiment alive past it's expiration date is unfamiliar to them so they have no idea what to do with it.
YouTube is the app around which both Google Play Music and now Podcasts are shutting down, so I doubt YouTube will go away. I won’t be surprised, however, if other apps are incorporated in like Play Movies and Play Books even.
Shitting down YouTube would be like shuttering Gmail or even Search. Seems unlikely.
Google shutting down youtube would be such a huge confidence loss that I don't think they would ever recover. It'll never happen unless things change drastically.
YouTube is too big and dominates too much of certain spaces for streaming. Shutting it down would be stupid. If Google no longer wanted it, it would make WAY more sense to sell. Someone would pay billions for that.
Edit: also, YouTube made $8billion in ad sales last quarter. YouTube ain’t going anywhere right now.
Another one in the Google graveyard.
Room to give a shout out to Podverse, free and open source!
Lol this is just google reader for your ears
Google seems to be caught in an awful feedback loop. I feel like at this point, most tech savy people are weary to try new Google services for fear of liking them, but eventually getting shutdown. In turn causing those tech savy users to not recommend it to their friends/family that actually might cause it to grow.
Honestly don't know how they get out it without either losing tons of money on maybe side projects or happening across the one things that's so good it's impossible to not use. The latter seems more unlikely by the day
I'm long past attaching anything important to new google services. They'd have to pay me to use their shit.
Anyone have a suggestion for a alternative simple light weight podcast app for android?
Edit: I installed antennapod and it's exactly what I was looking for. Very light weight and even open source. Thank you for all the suggestions.
Pocket casts. Also, you might be able to export your podcast subscriptions from Google Podcasts in opml format.
Podcast Addict
This was my favorite but I thought it shut down
I recently stopped using this. I prefer paying for things so I know they will be taken care of, but their price increases came without any improvements to the service for a while. If you are okay with paying though, it's pretty good.
AntennaPod is free and has worked well for me so far as a replacement. It isn't as intuitive with its discovery feature, but it works well enough.
Pocket casts, fucking amazing!
Another +1 for AntenaPod. It's fantastic.
I've been using the BeyondPod app. Simple and has a cast feature.
It's the only one that I've found that has Smart Play. I'm not sure why not all podcast players have this, it's such a great feature. Going back to something without it, would feel like going back to the stone age.
Podcast addict
Podcast Republic. I don't know if it's the best, but I'm used to it and it does everything I want and nothing I don't want. It's also open source.
I've been using BeyondPod for years.
Podkicker
google tries not to kill one of it's products challenge (impossible)
Fi hasn’t been competitive in many years anyway. You can get more and faster data for cheaper.
Honestly depends on location
Where I live, all the towers are Verizon (same signal as Google Fi) and US Cellular, and it's cheaper than both
I'll have to disagree here. Not only is the base plan for Fi cheaper, by a landslide, than any alternative I have, but it's also flexible. On top of that, they allow me to pay 0$ extra when I travel, on both calls, and data. That alone is a gigantic selling point to me, because it eliminated any need for temporary local sim cards
Yeah with fewer features and extra bullshit like not being able to tether, no intl coverage, no wifi calling etc. I have yet to find a real replacement for fi.
They didn't market this very well. Literally the first time I'm hearing about this
Name literally one thing that Google markets well.
Well, we use the word Google to mean using a search engine now, so that one was done pretty well. Otherwise I'm not sure.
I learned with Google music never get involved with Google with something you'll want to use daily. Google music hands down was the absolute best music service I've ever used. Google is like a kid with ADHD bouncing around from project to project never to see them through.
I used it from the start, I got in on the beta, and while it was nice, I wouldn't say "it was the absolute best". IMO Spotify is just as good, in fact I'd say it's better. It was nice that you could upload 20,000 of your own songs, but that was back before we had hundreds of gigs available on our phones.
Why do you consider it "the absolute best"?
As a former Google Play Music user and lover, it was the recommendations. I haven't found another service that shows me even a significant fraction of the music I like that Google did. I've switched to Spotify but it constantly recommends songs I've already heard or don't like and the shuffle feature gives me the same ~50 songs from a large playlist. It's something I've accepted but I miss the Google recommendations deeply.
For me it was the ability to upload my own library and stream it without a subscription, I ended up switching to plex and running my own server for a while but yeah Spotify just has the best deal with no effort so I caved to that especially with a family plan you can't beat it.
Yet another Google product that goes into the grave.
virtually everything that Google developed in-house was a failure. Videos, social media, WiFi balloons, smart cities. They couldn't even keep an RSS reader running.
How companies this incompetent became multibillion dollar monopolies is a mystery to me.
Which is why I’ll never use a Google product. Well except for gmail. I don’t have a choice because of work.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?t=14m36s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Lol they had podcast 😅
Years ago, Google shut down services I used and since then, I don’t get involved in anything they put out there on the market. This will include their AI service.
Only thing they are allowed to provide me is email. I’m even using YT and search drastically less.
Yeah I don't directly use any Google service that I'm not paying for. They either shut it down monetize the hell out of it or change how it works so that I have to change how I do things.
Why even use their email? It’s not encrypted so you’re the only one who can read it. They can read it too, and they do. They scan your email and use it to target ads at you. Bought something? They collect that data and look at the receipt, exactly how much you spent on each item. That’s creepy and weird.
Recommend switching to an encrypted email provider like Skiff, Proton, or Tuta. I’ve used all, but really digging Skiff at the moment.
Why use it
Good UI and I don't care that they're scraping my email for anything, I don't even see the ads they want to serve me thanks to my ad lockers
Extra work to move to a new email for literally no gains for me
They aren't using my emails for anything interesting as far as I can tell. Google ad sense either recommends I buy something that I bought months ago and don't need another one or recommends me content that I have zero interest in. I get so many ads for Epoch Times and Hillsdale.
Same, but I still use Google docs to store copies of all my published work.
It's been known for over a year that they're planning to replace it with YouTube music
Google has tried like three different podcast apps and they all suck.
I switched to Antennapod already. Nothing to complain about.
AntennaPod is amazing, literally my favorite app ever
Another one bites the dust !
Another one bites the dust
Sing it (another one bites the dust)
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I'm gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust
Ahh, another one for the ol’ Google Graveyard.
Time to get out of Google
Podcastsfor anyone that is still using the service
I have a Gmail account that catches/forwards stuff now and again that I signed up for over a decade ago, before I used a password manager and kept track of everything, and YouTube. A Google store line of credit, too, for pixels. Everything else I've migrated to my own website, or my own 'cloud'.
There was a big issue with Google Store/Fi Store a few years ago where devices were being 'lost' in transit, and it ended up being FedEx employees stealing them and resealing the packages. But Google's handling of the situation was absolutely shit, and two years of reading horror stories usually around bf or the holidays, drove me to migrate my account, one service at a time, to somewhere I could actually control and trust - as it is well-known that if you do a chargeback on G, they axe your gPay access, which means you can't buy or pay for anything: drive/photo storage, gOne, devices, apps/music/movies/games/books, app subscriptions, pay your bill on Fi or gDomains... and if it happened to me, I would not sit quietly with no device for weeks or months while G put the blame and suspicion on me. Fuck all that. Chargeback baby, it's not gonna be my problem anymoreeeee~
Took me from an outspoken G fanboy to 'run the fuck away' within 24 months, and all it took was stories of other's being treated like shit and being on the hook for hundreds or a thousand+ dollar devices, over and over, while support did fuck-all and the actual people 'investigating' were not accessible by any means.
This is ofc on top of G axing shit because they feel like it. Run your own mini server, own your data, don't be at the non-existant mercy of a massive soulless corporation.
Same shit happened when the Steam Deck released in 2022 as well. A bunch of them disappeared into FedEx. Fortunately, Valve promptly took care of anyone who was affected.
I have a few accounts for this purpose. I know at least one service I've had forwarded for years.
I jumped ship from most g- products years ago. I really should log into my accounts again and have anything necessary sent directly to my real email.
at it to the growing pile i guess..
Another one bites the dust
lol actually the first time I ever heard of it
I am, what's a good alternative.
I absolutely love Podcast Addict.
I'll add another vote for Podcast Addict.
That's the best one I found because of all the options. Prioritizing podcasts and auto downloading and adding them to the queue is so good. I listen to a news podcast that is like 10 minutes long everyday and I like that I could have it downloaded and play first on my commute then continue where I left off on the other podcasts without having to do it manually like with spotify
I like Podcast Republic because it's easy to keep it simple for troglodytes like myself who don't want or need all the bells and whistles.
I've been using AntennaPod recently
How does this impact listening to podcasts on Google home devices?
Great. Now use kasts and Antenna Pod
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.
The original article contains 382 words, the summary contains 121 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I use Spotify for my podcasts, but I will never check out YouTube Music podcasts. Having 2 ads before the start of a podcast as if I'm watching a YouTube video is just unacceptable for me.
Aaaaand this is why I didn't move my podcasts to Google Podcasts.
Called it!
Good. Podcast index 2.0.
Other than being relieved when they removed the podcast from Google play music (after shoehorning it into the GPM app for no good reason), I didn't really use this much. Pocketcasts has pretty much always done what I needed.
To their credit, at least they're still trying to build stuff. Microsoft avoids this problem by no longer innovating and just buying into whatever is trending. (Not that Google also isn't doing the same). If you never build anything new, you never risk killing a product that didn't trend, which happens a lot.
I think if they decide to kill off a product they should be required to open source it.
Required by who? Lemmy posters? How would this possibly be enforced? What constitutes a product vs a feature?
It's not even like Google podcasts was anything special, there's tons of better alternatives.
For anyone getting this news here. On Android, one of the best replacements is AntennaPod.
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.
The dev is also very responsive if you reach out with any issues.
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.
Another vote for Podcast Addict. It works with Android Auto in my car :-)
Now to listen to all these shows I have downloaded...
What you describe is also a feature of AntennaPod.
Edit: AntennaPod is also open source.
I’ve always been a fan of Pocket Casts personally.
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.
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 really like this app, not so much paying a subscription. But I wanted access on both my phone and my PC and that was the only way to get it.
I recommend Podcast Republic. Maybe recommend that to people?
Also a big fan of AntennaPod, I switched to it back when Google first announced they were axing Podcasts and thought I'd have a lot less time to abandon ship than I ended up with.
deleted
Looking at the data safety info, I think I'll go with Antenna Pod
To be fair perhaps they want to make it possible to download the podcast unencrypted in MP3
Completely fair, it it however worth mentioning that you can disable this data collection in settings.
I'm a big fan of Podcast Republic. Great dev, feature-rich, and a much improved UI from when I first started using it.
Podcast Republic is my choice as well. It's the only Podcast app that I could find that let's you choose your download folder. I like to play my podcasts with the same app I listen to books with, so I need to download the podcasts to a publicly accessible folder.
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.
For iOS, Overcast is the only correct answer
Please elaborate.
I have come to rather like Downcast on iOS myself. Should check it out if you never have.
I still use the default app. What can be better there?
I went to download it, and apparently I already had! Now to start subscribing to everything again...bleh.
There’s also the option to export Google Podcasts subscriptions as an OPML file if you want to switch to a third-party app.
PodcastAddict is better in my opinion
Yeah podcast addict was the shit
Thanks for the recommendation. I was wondering what else to try as I sure as hell don't want to use YouTube and it doesn't seem like you can have a separate podcast playlist in Spotify.
I tried AntennaPod but went back because of Android Auto. I just found this showing how to get AntennaPod on AndroidAuto!
https://antennapod.org/documentation/playback/android-auto
Selfhost Audiobookshelf