That miss was what pushed me to google podcast in the first place, along with their absolute refusal to fix broken feeds for existing podcasts in their index.
It's getting killed off. Some features from Google Podcasts may make their way into YT Music, but I doubt all of them will (the Google Play Music 'migration' told me everything I need to know)
Especially considering how migration from Google Music to YT Music went.
Personally despite looking to get into podcasts I ended up writing off Google Podcasts from the start, expecting it will stop working just like Listen did.
That was an annoying and janky migration, but Youtube Music has a better interface than Google Play Music ever did.
Though conceptually it's still just weird. A video that I like on youtube because of the video component isn't necessarily a song I want to listen to as music. Also it really needs the ability to block music from certain artists.
As far as the android app goes I disagree. While there are minor improvements, there are major steps backwards in offline playing, library management and account management. An entirely frustrating experience trying to use the app.
I get that different products would be pretty siloed within their corporate structure, so I know that they weren't just going to use the YouTube code. However, why are products that are released well after plenty of other apps have forged a path so that the new app can research what works and doesn't work, what do people like/not like, and all of that type of basic information just so abysmally ignored so that this "new" thing is so inferior?
If you're not the first pioneering version of something, you better be doing everything the others are doing, but better. Otherwise, what's the point of your product?
I've been out of Google for over a decade, but my understanding is that their advancement metrics are still rather broken in incentivizing people to reinvent the wheel and call it new and innovative, rather than link some other team's code and contribute patches back.
I was a paid Google Music from way back. The best thing about the move to YouTube Music was opening up all kinds of independent tracks and mashups that weren't available in official music catalogs.
I've been on Google Play Music (and now YT Music) for ~8 years. YT Music has a different catalog (by my estimation it's less complete than GPM's was) and also lets you pull up songs/videos from youtube (which can't be downloaded for offline listening like other songs, and are just kind of mixed in with everything else).
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.
I can confirm that the catalog is less complete in YTM because back when they shut GPM I took the effort to migrate my playlists and I lost quite a few songs of them in the progress, and even more then within a year (of which YTM can't even tell me the title anymore, it's just an unavailable item)
Yeah, originally GPM actually had the ability to actually upload your whole music library, matchable or not, and let you listen from the cloud. All of that was available without a subscription fee!
I migrated my account too, since I have YT Premium anyway, but I don’t even know if that’s a feature anymore or how to access that aspect of my library, like, to add new songs from MP3s I own.
I’ve also come to enjoy Apple Music. Has the same upload capabilities I liked with google music plus it matches them to lossless these days. Took apple like 5-6 years to make the ui not suck but it’s decent these days too. Also, no joe rogan podcast being recommended to me constantly when I just want music and there’s a nice separate classical music app too.
I don't think I've ever had a JRE podcast recommended to me on Spotify. They seem to have dialed down the podcasts in the front page (or at least they did so for people who care less about them, like me). I still get some and I agree that it's pretty annoying especially when I misclick on a podcast (especially jarring since podcasts have ads even with premium!)
Nothing is worse than constantly seeing jre show up on your cars CarPlay/android auto screen because of Spotify. I will never use them again because of that. Also their high bitrate lossless rollout was a lie.
Yeah, I also used Play Music a lot (specifically because you could purchase songs and albums). Back in the day I waffled between Play Music and Amazon for buying tracks (I'm not in the Apple ecosystem).
The forced deathmarch to YouTube Music and its advertisement hell was a massive "fuck you" for trusting Google to at least not be assholes if you're buying items from them. I had a huge library of music purchased on Play and nothing worked to backup/download them. All the purchases disappeared in YouTube Music. Google "support" with the issues was... exactly what you would expect.
I didn't get into podcasts until a few years ago during the pandemic. But I refused to ever consider touching Google Podcasts. On the one hand with Google you know the entity you're dealing with so there's a certain ease that the name has vs trusting a different company. But increasingly it's just not worth it. They're like an elephant grazing on the savanna and you're a dung beetle. You can often find that Google shit is usable and useful, but they won't even notice if they step on you. I avoid Google if I can avoid it.
I probably come off as an unhinged google hater to some, solely because of my extreme hate for google having killed Google Music. I loved that application so much, especially before it was reskinned with material.
The way the Google Play Music vs YouTube Music crap played out is the worst (best?) example of "shipping the org chart" I can imagine. I worked at Google at the time, and it was just ridiculous to watch.
What kind of dysfunctional company deathmarches its users like this between two competing brands and products right in its own company, and is so committed to doing it wholesale that it's willing to mass-lose customers as well as features? The kind that puts its internal politics and product manager's careers and ideas ahead of customers' needs.
For at least a year after the transition you couldn't chromecast from YouTube Music on the web. The internal buganizer ticket on the matter was a shitshow. No accountability for the fact that we were killing something that worked and replacing with something that didn't even work with our own products.
Likewise, YTM on Android Auto was a similarly terrible backwards step in user interface and capabilities. It's been some years so I forget what irked me, but there was a laundry list of them.
At one point there were I think 3 Google product places where you could play podcasts; YTM, GPM, and Google Podcasts. None talking with each other about subscriptions, etc.
That and the whole idea of meshing a video recommendation system with a music recommendation system was just busted. My kids watched Minecraft or whatever videos on YouTube on the family (Android) TV So I started getting recommendations in YTM for video game music and what not.
The entire orientation of YouTube is around various random clips and the like. A music service like Spotify or (RIP) GPM is about albums and singles and EPs. YouTube's whole recommendation model wasn't built for it, IMHO.
GPM had a good recommendations engine. YTM pushed top 40 crap on me. I tried to tune it, but it failed.
I'd ask my Google display assistant device (I worked on them and had a couple around the house) to play some music, and it would spool up and start playing a video on YouTube instead. Because clearly that's what I'd want.
Harmonizing product lines and concentrating efforts and changing brands around etc is entirely reasonable. But you don't do it in a way that drops features and pisses off customers. You do it carefully and with respect. The way this played out was ... YouTube organization "won", Google Play team "lost."
What I'm getting from this is that I will be hearing many more ads, and be unable to listen to podcasts if my screen is off or if I switch to any other apps on my phone.
Yeah, for now. I used to be able to split my screen and have YouTube running in the background while in other apps, until they took that away in an update.
As a free user on Android, I'm able to use YT in PiP mode with any non-music video. Also FWIW, I doubt YT Music will ever have enough monopolistic control over the podcast industry to take away such fundamental functionality.
> In addition, Google will also support the option to download an OPML file of their show subscriptions from Google Podcasts, which they can upload to any app that supports importing if they don’t want to move to YouTube Music.
Sure, YouTube now has a "Podcasts" category, like they have "Gaming".
youtube.com/podcasts
They don't have RSS feeds or even audio file support. If you're a podcaster, you have to take your audio files and add a still image or audiogram to turn it into a video, then upload _that_.
Is Google even serious about YouTube Music? The entire music experience, especially on TV with the YouTube app, is downright awful. On the Apple TV YouTube app, they don't even have proper music controls like repeat, shuffle and so on.
Google Podcasts is still around until next year, and the Youtube Music app will have that functionality added this year. It's all in the first paragraph.
They said the same thing with Google Play Music, and never added the same functionality to YT music, which is massively inferior for everything besides discovering new music
A good option for power users, probably a bit overwhelming if you just want something simple, but for someone like me that wants to do stuff like different default playback speeds for different podcasts, it's really good.
I wish there was an open source backend service for syncing. Since the clients are open source, should be technically possible to replicate the functionality of the cloud service. But maybe that's harder than just creating from scratch? Too bad though because pocket casts is definitely one of the best android clients around.
PocketCasts is open source and is decent. It was bought by Automattic (who also own and develop WordPress), so should be a reasonably safe bet going forward.
Yes, I'm using it. I first started using Spotify for podcasts but those idiots (sorry Spotify) don't let you disable the auto play so it automatically starts a new podcast after you finish one. At least on the free tier. I then switched to Google. The reason I care is that I often listen to podcasts when I'm in bed at night as it helps me sleep.
For me, Spotify on Mobile has a sleep timer functionality and one of the options of "End of episode". I do have premium so cannot confirm if it exists on the free tier.
The autoplay is extra annoying when listening to an older episode too. When you go to the full list it automatically jumps to the one last played. Scrolling long lists in Spotify is very buggy.
The only way to fix it is mark the newly-started episode as played, then mark as unplayed. So many extra steps that shouldn’t even be necessary in the first place.
Oh no, not that service I never used because I learned my lesson trusting Google with basic media organizational applications!
Seriously, it's sad that they broke their reputation on this, but the writing was on the wall from day zero. If you're an Android user, I recommend BeyondPod (http://www.beyondpod.mobi/android/index.htm): it's simple, it's reliable, it integrates to a search engine, and it also supports pasting in links with authentication so you can get any Patreon exclusive feeds you have access to (something that, to my knowledge, Google Podcasts was never able to support).
TBH this doesn't matter that much, as there are plenty of other great podcast apps that one can use. This is one of the things I love most about the podcast ecosystem is that (at least for now), it's a very open platform with the exception of Spotify exclusives.
Good riddance, what a dumpster fire. The tiny buttons for pause, replay, skip buttons are all right next to each other on the lock screen, so you often skip podcasts when you really want to pause or fast forward. on the other hand, the rewind 10-seconds button has half the real estate of the widget. Downloads arent automatically deleted even after the episode is completed (even if you mark as played or remove from queue). There's no skip intro/outro options.
Frankly, the Overcast app is one of the main things attracting me to iOS at this point, and a dearth of good native podcast clients is hurting the Pixel/Google ecosystem
I'm pretty happy with _Podcast Republic_ on Android. Its a bit of a "power user" app, but I have yet to find something that I want to tweak that it doesn't let me tweak via its vast settings menus.
I switched from iOS/Overcast to Android/PocketCasts and I found it had a number of benefits which I struggle to recall now... batch downloads might be one of them.
My main bug bear is how how some screens are drawers and some screens are pages which makes navigation confusing. Even after years of use, I still keep accidentally closing the drawer screens when trying to scroll and trying to navigate backwards which isn't allowed. Please... just make them all pages so they behave consistently with the same navigation and gestures.
I use PocketCasts on iOS and agree about the sheets, I think the theory is that your "Now Playing" page is basically an overlay that can exist anywhere in the app, so you can go around looking at other podcasts while you listen but quickly pop back in to what's playing. Apple Music is set up the same way, I wonder if that was the inspiration for that layout.
As they say, those who don't understand / learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Apple learned that having them separate was more beneficial, a lesson Google and Spotify have not.
I've never understood this bundling. I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of music. I always know what I want to listen to. I don't need or want podcasts cluttering up my music app when I'm trying to play or discover music. I don't need or want music cluttering up my podcasts when I am trying work through my infinitely long podcast queue. It's never the case that I'm looking for _either_ a podcast or music to fill the silence.
Different use cases. Different audio mediums. Different apps.
Does this mean that people who are paying for subscriptions to Youtube Music so they can listen to music will now be flooded with recommendations and ads for podcasts, just like on Spotify?
They had one of the OG podcast apps, Google Listen from 2009, year after first Android phone release. Probably part of someones 5%. Which was surprisingly functional, and of course they killed it 3 years later.
It's astonishing the strategy that Google follows with their products. This trend of releasing stuff and cancelling it later is reaching the point of being meme. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand that markets are hard to predict and compete in and offering a competent product at those sizes requires a lot of economic and human effort but for god sake, I seriously think they should plan better and think twice because this is seriously damaging their image.
235 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 491 ms ] threadGoogle Play Music (2011 - 2020)
Google Podcasts (2018 - 2024)
That miss was what pushed me to google podcast in the first place, along with their absolute refusal to fix broken feeds for existing podcasts in their index.
The UI might not be as good. I guess we’ll see.
Especially considering how migration from Google Music to YT Music went.
Personally despite looking to get into podcasts I ended up writing off Google Podcasts from the start, expecting it will stop working just like Listen did.
Though conceptually it's still just weird. A video that I like on youtube because of the video component isn't necessarily a song I want to listen to as music. Also it really needs the ability to block music from certain artists.
If you're not the first pioneering version of something, you better be doing everything the others are doing, but better. Otherwise, what's the point of your product?
Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of songs, or sort songs in your catalog by listen count (which was my favourite feature of GPM). I suspect they're doing this because they've changed their accounting to get away with paying artists less (the % completion rate to 'count' has changed, or perhaps they're not counting some listens altogether)
The one saving grace of YTM is that its predictive playlists are actually pretty decent, and there are a lot of them.
I migrated my account too, since I have YT Premium anyway, but I don’t even know if that’s a feature anymore or how to access that aspect of my library, like, to add new songs from MP3s I own.
The forced deathmarch to YouTube Music and its advertisement hell was a massive "fuck you" for trusting Google to at least not be assholes if you're buying items from them. I had a huge library of music purchased on Play and nothing worked to backup/download them. All the purchases disappeared in YouTube Music. Google "support" with the issues was... exactly what you would expect.
I didn't get into podcasts until a few years ago during the pandemic. But I refused to ever consider touching Google Podcasts. On the one hand with Google you know the entity you're dealing with so there's a certain ease that the name has vs trusting a different company. But increasingly it's just not worth it. They're like an elephant grazing on the savanna and you're a dung beetle. You can often find that Google shit is usable and useful, but they won't even notice if they step on you. I avoid Google if I can avoid it.
What kind of dysfunctional company deathmarches its users like this between two competing brands and products right in its own company, and is so committed to doing it wholesale that it's willing to mass-lose customers as well as features? The kind that puts its internal politics and product manager's careers and ideas ahead of customers' needs.
For at least a year after the transition you couldn't chromecast from YouTube Music on the web. The internal buganizer ticket on the matter was a shitshow. No accountability for the fact that we were killing something that worked and replacing with something that didn't even work with our own products.
Likewise, YTM on Android Auto was a similarly terrible backwards step in user interface and capabilities. It's been some years so I forget what irked me, but there was a laundry list of them.
At one point there were I think 3 Google product places where you could play podcasts; YTM, GPM, and Google Podcasts. None talking with each other about subscriptions, etc.
That and the whole idea of meshing a video recommendation system with a music recommendation system was just busted. My kids watched Minecraft or whatever videos on YouTube on the family (Android) TV So I started getting recommendations in YTM for video game music and what not.
The entire orientation of YouTube is around various random clips and the like. A music service like Spotify or (RIP) GPM is about albums and singles and EPs. YouTube's whole recommendation model wasn't built for it, IMHO.
GPM had a good recommendations engine. YTM pushed top 40 crap on me. I tried to tune it, but it failed.
I'd ask my Google display assistant device (I worked on them and had a couple around the house) to play some music, and it would spool up and start playing a video on YouTube instead. Because clearly that's what I'd want.
Harmonizing product lines and concentrating efforts and changing brands around etc is entirely reasonable. But you don't do it in a way that drops features and pisses off customers. You do it carefully and with respect. The way this played out was ... YouTube organization "won", Google Play team "lost."
I gave up, cancelled my sub, and bought Spotify.
> Podcasts in YouTube Music will be available regardless of whether you have a YouTube Premium subscription.
> The company notes that all users can listen to podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, and while casting
youtube.com/podcasts
They don't have RSS feeds or even audio file support. If you're a podcaster, you have to take your audio files and add a still image or audiogram to turn it into a video, then upload _that_.
> YouTube Music is not available in your area
How do I subscribe to Podcasts on an Android phone now?
Google Podcasts is still around until next year, and the Youtube Music app will have that functionality added this year. It's all in the first paragraph.
They said the same thing with Google Play Music, and never added the same functionality to YT music, which is massively inferior for everything besides discovering new music
[1] https://antennapod.org/
[2] https://gpodder.net/
[1] https://pocketcasts.com/
[0] https://antennapod.org/
The only way to fix it is mark the newly-started episode as played, then mark as unplayed. So many extra steps that shouldn’t even be necessary in the first place.
Seriously, it's sad that they broke their reputation on this, but the writing was on the wall from day zero. If you're an Android user, I recommend BeyondPod (http://www.beyondpod.mobi/android/index.htm): it's simple, it's reliable, it integrates to a search engine, and it also supports pasting in links with authentication so you can get any Patreon exclusive feeds you have access to (something that, to my knowledge, Google Podcasts was never able to support).
Frankly, the Overcast app is one of the main things attracting me to iOS at this point, and a dearth of good native podcast clients is hurting the Pixel/Google ecosystem
It's now owned by Automattic (of Wordpress.com and tumblr) and the clients are open source
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android
My main bug bear is how how some screens are drawers and some screens are pages which makes navigation confusing. Even after years of use, I still keep accidentally closing the drawer screens when trying to scroll and trying to navigate backwards which isn't allowed. Please... just make them all pages so they behave consistently with the same navigation and gestures.
Apple just finished UNbundling everything from one monolithic app, now people want it back?
Different use cases. Different audio mediums. Different apps.
Great...
Remember kids, never build anything onto Google.
Google Podcasts is so simple it could even have been an open source reference app showcasing Flutter and some backend GCP services.
Same reason Reader got killed.
Nobody wants to work on that.
Creating something new and half-baked is what promo packets are made of!