Not at launch. Google Play Music did, iirc, which is why I switched to Podcast Addict when GPM lost podcast support and they launched Google Podcasts. People complaining that Google Podcasts is another incidence of "Google replaced a good app with a bad one" are missing the detail that this is also Google Podcasts' origin story. Get off the treadmill.

I do feel genuinely bad for any developers who had to work on a dead-end product like that though.