Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.
I know, I know, using Google apps isn’t the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.
Apparently they’re moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts aren’t implemented yet.
I’ve moved over to an app from F-Droid.
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I don’t really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.
I’m still bitter over Inbox.
I used to be excited about new things from Google. Tried to get into every beta, downloaded the newest released apps etc. But not anymore.
I just read about tasks being removed from Google Keep. Then the feature removal from nest hubs. Do they have a unified strategy at all? Or is it just the whims of a manager’s daily musings that drive what development does?
It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.
You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products.
No kidding.
It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can’t create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.
Android users literally run their lives out of Google Calendar. Think you can share your calendar with a friend from your phone? Think again. It’s back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!
Oh you’re not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phone’s browser. I dare you.
I’m still waiting for the day when we can create an event from a message in Gmail.
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.
This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.
In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?
Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.
My god, the assistant, yes. After catching up with Siri it was actually useful. And now it seems all it does is plop whatever you say into a Google search. And since they killed that, too, well…
I think deep down, everybody, including Google, realizes this all ends with them retaining their customer s solely through the blackmail they have accumulated over the years.
Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing “inbox” into the address bar to get to my emails.
There’s still no better email client than inbox. It was so fucking good
They have an agenda, which isn’t aligned with your agenda. They only care about profitability, so they kill any projects not supporting that goal. Some projects are created to gather specific data sets about users, and the project is shut down when the data is captured, regardless of how popular the project was. They are always doing something with an ulterior motive. Once you understand that then you won’t be mystified by their decisions anymore.
They only care about profitability
It’s not even profitability. It’s about what looks good on a resume.
New projects look good. Maintaining old projects doesn’t.
I’ve heard a theory that says all the apps and services they make only have the purpose of collecting data. Sort of like limited time experiments. Once they get all they need from one of them they kill it and move on.
Sometimes they pretend to roll a dead service into another product in order to drive customers to that product but it’s done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.
It would certainly explain a lot.
I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There’s barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)
I’m not ready to be reminded of the loss of inbox
I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.
Try AntennaPod, it’s on F-Droid
One of the best apps on any platform
For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’
One of my favorite podcast app.
Grabbed AntennaPod from the Play Store. It’s been a perfect replacement.
I’m kind of into Podscast Addict. Not sure how it compares, but its pretty good.
It’s not open source
R.I.P.
Tombstone 2018 - 2024 Google Podcasts
Killed 26 days ago, Google Podcasts was a podcast hosting platform and an Android podcast listening app. It was almost 6 years old.
Pixel Pass
Killed 8 months ago, Pixel Pass was a program that allowed users to pay a monthly charge for their Pixel phone and upgrade immediately after two years. It was almost 2 years old.
Well, that seems particularly scummy.
They did allow users to upgrade once first.
That’s good. The article linked to by the graveyard made it seem like they didn’t.
Indeed.What a rip-off! :(
Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker
Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.
🤯 😂
How else are they gonna half ass implement that into youtube and make that shit bloated af.
It has long form content, Tiktok clone, Main music delivery system, Twitch clone, And now, Podcasts.
👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼
It seems like their trying to roll everything into the over media app and subscription
Kind of makes sense, all their other apps are pretty fragmented and crappy.
Going to be called YouTube Podcasts. Soon to be spun off into Google Wallet + Podcasts, then to be renamed Podcasts Pay, then Pay Podcasts, then Google Chrome with Podcasts.
Google Nest Home Chromecast TV with Podcasts Premium+
With different tiers of subscription.
This sounds unfortunately real. Insanity.
It also has games now.
I don’t think it’s rolled out to a lot of people. No one at work can see them except me, but my Google app has games that I can bring up.
I don’t have YouTube Pro or whatever its called now and when I listen to music on my Google home it plays an ad after ever song. Since I have switched to Pihole and blocked googles DNS servers the only ads I get are to buy premium YouTube which I assume are hardcoded into something somewhere.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google’s euthanasia project:
- YouTube
- Google Search
- Chrome
- “core” Android system + Play Store (it counts as one)
- AdSense
The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can’t fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.
Gmail and Gsuite pretty safe too.
Good catch on GMail - it’s at the same time a vector to invade your privacy and an additional barrier for people leaving the Google
ecosystembattery farm.I’m not sure on GSuite.
GSuite is well used in corporate settings as a cheaper alternative to O365 enterprise.
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech
They’ve primarily been an ad company ever since they acquired DoubleClick in 2008.
Antennapod?
Switched to Antennapod when abandoning Spotify recently. It’s been great! Way better interface than Spotify’s embarrassingly horrible UI.
Love it!
Been on it for a few years now. It’s great.
The only other one I’d really recommend is Podcast Addict. I only switched to Antennapod because it has a little less busy UI.
Fine. I finally installed f-droid, because while I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, I am trying to listen to more, and YT Music is ass for finding new podcasts.
Please give me recommendations for more podcasts that may like based on what I got
Darknet Diaries
TrashFuture is great if you want to be amused/depressed by tech journalist news.
Lions Led By Donkeys is a great war history podcast series.
Neither have ads, which I really value in any podcast. Probably the only reason I don’t subscribe to BtB.
Another vote for Antennapod.
Now that it has **rudimentary Ad-Skipping **
You can set et to skip X seconds in the beginning and Y seconds at the end of each podcast individually.
Maybe one day we will get Sponsor block integration for crowd sourced ad skipping , or AI using the crowd sourced skip points as a guide to fine-tune skipping on device , ( everyone tends to get different length advertisements , depending on targetting or region )
I’m more inclined to not be annoyed too much by ads on podcasts where you know it’s just some guy or gal getting compensated for the work they are putting into their podcast. That said, maybe I’m getting way fewer ads on Antennapod because of said adblocking, not sure.
I will say, it has a bug where it will not work in a work profile. You can install it but it won’t playback. Which is annoying. But for me it is a small complaint.
I moved to Podcast Republic, and sometimes AntennaPod, on Android, Downcast on iPhone, and just import the OPML from one of those into gpodder to listen on desktop/laptop.
No accounts or other BS to keep up with, just the latest OPML export. Much nicer, and no one can take it away from me or “shut the service down” in the future.
Friendly reminder that YouTube music STILL doesn’t have the ability to sort songs in a playlist alphabetically
Friendly reminder that YouTube Music laid off an entire team of 43 unionized workers the very moment two of them went before the Austin City Council to ask them to help pressure Google execs to come to the bargaining table to provide them with fair pay and benefits.
This is exactly why I never started using this app. Not worth investing my time. Still on Pocket Casts for years
I hope they soon figure out their F-Droid release, it’s taken them months already
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
I thought pocket casts was proprietary.
They open sourced it in 2022:
They went open source on Github after they were acquired by Automattic.
TIL. I’ve used the app for 30 months, and somehow never found out about that.
You should switch to AntennaPod.
That’s my go to, FOSS app that rivals the major apps.
There are other podcast apps on F-Droid also.
Sorry - the data we used to spy on you for through this app, is now available to us by spying on other apps and devices. Its therefore too expensive for us to keep running it when it is no longer necessary
I mean, at some level, how many podcast apps do we need?
But on the other hand, you’re fucking Google and this is a glorified RSS feed. Why is it so hard for this company to maintain quality apps? The Google graveyard is filled with so many good ideas.
I just ignore any new Google service these days. Unreliability isn’t even as much of a concern as privacy.
Google music, Google+, Google Spaces, they even killed Google Cache recently - which was a fantastic way to get around my work’s brain-dead decision to block the company (including IT) from reaching Reddit.
You would think with the further advancement of humanity, with or without technology we would have more reason to cache and archive things out there whether it’s by the written word of paper, the internet or via our phone cameras.
Maybe try Redlib for accessing Reddit. You can also use LibRedirect to automatically redirect Reddit links.
Alternatively, use this guide to create a Cloudflare proxy for any website you want to visit that is blocked
This is weird marketing, why not just say “we’re merging Google podcast and YouTube music into one app”?
YouTube music is a steaming pile of crap and I hate it.
I still miss Google reader
You might enjoy feedly
Plugging Podcast Addict. I don’t even use the paid version, but it is awesome!
Unfortunately not FOSS 😭
That is unfortunate. But it’s like an old-school program: does everything possible, just consider the options yourself!
Unfortunately it’s also filled with trackers: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.bambuna.podcastaddict/latest/
I’m just making sure I live up to its name:
Podcast Addict is THE feature rich podcast client. A boatload of features and if it doesn’t do what you need you request it in the support site.
It has its issues: closed source (if that matters to you), I’ve read that there are trackers, and ads, but it’s still the best podcast app out there, hands down.
I wish it was open source and not filled with trackers
As long as that’s the case, I’ll definitely continue using AntennaPod
