Podcast Addict has some niche features I really like, I like being able to have a different automatic playback speed per-podcast, as I tailor it to the talking speed of the specific podcasters. The UI can be a bit cluttered, but in a power-user "I can make this work exactly how I want for each podcast" way.
I liked Beyond Pod, but haven't used it in a long time. The ability to schedule automatic downloads was great when I was more aggressive in reducing cell data usage.
Many thanks for pointing it out, I was wondering where to go afterwards, because Google Podcasts was a sweetspot for me in terms of features, and all the alternatives seemed too much for me.
I use it regularly on Android Auto. Not sure how representative my case is, but I have had to initiate playback from my phone. It doesn't seem to show up with a visible interface and icons the way that, say, Audible does.
I love antennapod, and that is the app that I use. However, it is very much a power user tool, whereas Google podcasts was very much not. Pod verse is a very good app that is closer to Google podcasts than antennapod is. But that being said, for people on hacker News antenna pod is definitely worth checking out. Long time, very happy user since Pocket casts sold out and also completely redid their UI even though it was essentially perfection. The UI now is so much worse it's such a good example to me of how the constant push for redesign is not always progressive. Sometimes it's very regressive.
The author could make the process of adding a YouTube RSS address easier. For
example, www.youtube.com could be added as a search option alongside itunes.apple.com and api.ffyd.de.
For me it's faster and more flexible to automate all RSS and download tasks on the commandline using custom utilities. Then upload the MP3 files to a folder on the phone so can listen offline using the app.
Add Podcast | Add local folder
If going to be online then just use direct URLs to MP3s. More flexible.
Pocketcasts is what I have been using for over a decade and it's never let me down. It comes with a web player as well so you can listen from a web browser.
Same here. One of the few non open source app i'm pretty sure it will never let me down (Fingers crossed). If I remember correctly they perfectly behaved each time they could have screwed up the relationship by the past.
Yes, Overcast is iOS-only, though the developer does allow the iPad version to run on macOS and visionOS and will fix bugs. An Android version (or anything outside the Apple ecosystem, really) is explicitly not planned. He has mentioned that multiple times publicly.
Overcast has the best audio quality. Volume normalization so all voices are the same volume and smart speed to shorten silences but still sounding natural is amazing.
Antennapod and pocket casts implementations of those features aren't good enough.
Smart speed is such an absolutely amazing feature that I wish more audio apps had it (e.g., Audible).
For those unaware, you set the speed to something like 1.75x. It analyzes the audio and shortens the time within dead space (e.g., the natural pause between sentences, words, etc)
You can see this happen in real time as the smart speed display updates and you see the rate you’re listening to the podcast goes up to like 2.5x, 3x and even 4x. All because of reducing dead space. It’s insane.
That might be true. But I'd rather bet on a startup:
1) If the product is successful, they will likely have continued growth and support (via an acquisition or other exit). If the product sucks I don't really want it anyway. With Google, the success of the product doesn't seem aligned to their strategy on when to keep products. There are perfectly viable products with plausibly profitable, high margins, if they were operating a stand-a-lone business that get shut down. The bet is not just on the success of the product, but also google's overall business strategy, which is much more contingent - especially at this point given their track record.
2) Established companies other than google usually do a better job providing an off-ramp to other services, or sell their customer-base to a competitor, rather than shutting down. Google, to their credit, is very good about providing the data so "someone" can manage a migration - they just don't make set up the continuity themselves. Early-stage companies are often bad at this too though.
> Those who trust the Google’s app to listen to podcasts have almost three months to export their subscriptions to another app.
Alternative take: Those who trust any Google app or service to do anything should reconsider or at the very least keep a permanent and up-to-date contingency plan for when Google inevitably discontinues it.
Fooled you once, shame on Google. Fooled you 294 times, shame on you.
The more nuanced take is that Google tries a lot of different things and, at least on a percentage basis, most of them don't really take off and it kills them. I didn't even know Google had a podcast app. I'm not sure that keeping apps/services around in some half-dead state maintained by one developer who pissed someone off supporting it is necessarily a better alternative.
The service I'm sort of amazed is still around is Blogger which is actually a decent option for free blogging.
> The more nuanced take is that Google tries a lot of different things and, at least on a percentage basis, most of them don't really take off and it kills them.
The even more nuanced take is that that’s a self-perpetuating cycle of Google’s own fault. It‘s constantly killing off stuff, so whatever users any app has feel burned and they are less likely to try Google’s next thing. Which means fewer users, which means the new thing doesn’t take off, so it’s killed. Rinse and repeat.
> I didn't even know Google had a podcast app.
Neither did I. Because I already know it’s not worth investing any time trying any of Google’s stuff and as a consequence pay no attention to their releases, thus I’m never a user. Thus the cycle continues. I’m far from alone in that.
> I'm not sure that keeping apps/services around in some half-dead state maintained by one developer who pissed someone off supporting it is necessarily a better alternative.
Maybe not. Or maybe they need to bite the bullet for a while to regain trust.
And 270+ products and services that are still alive and resourced.
I've got an alternate take -- don't depend on _any_ other company's service without a contingency plan for if/when it disappears. Attend to possible lock-in regardless of the source, unless you have direct control over its existence. Nothing is permanent.
At the risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I'll even suggest that I'd rather a company be willing to retire products and move around resources. Especially if the application has limited available growth and there are several alternatives. Holding on to every product like it's precious is how you acquire some very insidious technical debt.
I'm sure there are more than a few of those 294 applications whose time had come for them to go. Were some gone too soon? Perhaps. Some were definitely loved. Does killing off loved products threaten the positive sentiment of users? Of course. But so does stagnation. It's a trade-off decision that neither of us had any ability to alter.
People go on about Google Reader but 1.) There are still RSS readers out there and 2.) It's easier to blame Google than to blame the 99%+ of the population who wouldn't have known what RSS was if it ran over them on the street. It's just not how the mainstream wanted to consume information after social media came along.
Do I think Google could have possibly done a better job with something like Google+ if its DNA were different? Possibly.
Do I think its product strategy around chat and video meetings was hilariously bad? Absolutely, even if Meet and Gchat seem perfectly adequate integrated tools today.
But I also think something like Wave had some innovative ideas that just didn't grab people. I'm not sure they should have kept it around on life support for years.
> don't depend on _any_ other company's service without a contingency plan for if/when it disappears.
Agreed. But some companies are higher risk than others. There are apps that I use that I would never have installed or looked at twice if they were made by Google, because the risk of discontinuation is through the roof.
> I'll even suggest that I'd rather a company be willing to retire products and move around resources. (…) Holding on to every product like it's precious is how you acquire some very insidious technical debt.
Again, agreed. But if they’re so lenient with the axe, they should be more selective regarding what goes out in the first place.
> Some were definitely loved. Does killing off loved products threaten the positive sentiment of users? Of course.
And that is exactly why. Soon “everyone” stops trusting your apps and you enter a vicious cycle where nothing ever gets off the ground.
> But so does stagnation.
I never heard anyone complain of Google Reader being stagnant. Or if they did, their voices were drowned by all the ones complaining for the discontinuation. Anecdotally, I’ve felt the same thing with every moderately liked product Google has discontinued.
Google’s recommendation to switch to YouTube podcasts has been pretty lackluster in our experience. Every podcast episode gets uploaded as a video and included in the main “Videos” tab of your channel in addition to being under “Podcasts.” So when you have dozens of podcasts with thousands of episodes, your main video feed really gets messed up unless that was your intention to mix the two.
I have ranted about Google dropping products before and I will continue to do so.
Google keeps fumbling the opportunity to own large swathes of the web experience while cutting into competitors. Although Google Podcasts probably looked like a minor loss on the quarterly balance sheet, the intangible brand benefits and especially the analytics that could be garnered from having a large population using your product are hard to overstate.
Even apple realized this when they relaunched their podcast app.
Experienced people know better, newcomers get burned and end up learning through experience or knowledge transfer from others. If you’re investing your time or resources into using a new Google product at this point, that’s on you.
To help others you know DeGoogle their life is a public service.
Well, sending LibreOffice documents back and forth is not too bad. Yes, it's not a real-time collaboration but it works surprisingly well if both parties are open minded enough to go back to a slower workflow.
Apple with iCloud also has some basic collaboration features for pages.
Yes, Google docs has become dominant and people use it because it's there. But we'd definitely get along fine without it too.
I sent documents around at work for many years. It's awful in general compared to collaborative document editing and I would absolutely hate to go back to using LibreOffice (or Microsoft) presentation or word documents for most purposes. Perhaps I did more of it than you have but collaborative document editing is a huge upgrade.
I get that. I would love it if LibreOffice had some sort of feature. Maybe it could even be integrated into some kind of open chat protocol like Matrix...
For what it's worth, it's a suggestion for LyX [1], not TeX. Lyx uses TeX/LaTeX, but you don't need to know TeX to use Lyx, anymore than you need to know how to use Microsoft Word with the control codes visible, to use Word. It's a powerful feature underneath you can drop into, but they are both GUI document editors. I would not recommend Lyx as a replacement for Microsoft Word if it's just a simple one-page letter. But it's quite a good suggestion for an alternative if you are writing a book or an academic paper. It has features to support citations, tables of contents etc., maybe better than Word does in some cases. (I've loved and used Lyx for two decades now, so I just had to defend it here, sorry.)
At this point I've come to believe that Google does this intentionally. Enter a market, rely on brand recognition to build a user base, slurp up data, then leave if the ad revenue doesn't pay for maintenance. At worst, you create a couple new users and keep a lot of existing users in your circle until the next shiny thing comes along.
I mean it has to be backfiring at this point, right? Right?
I used to LOVE Google products, but I have been burned sooo many times now I am just inclined to not even trying anything Google puts out because they are but a sand mandala in the wind.
About a year ago I had a friend convince me to try Google Domains, despite my better judgement. It was a wonderful experience and within just a couple months, true to form, Google pulled the rug out from me once again, presumably yelling “Gotcha!” while they did so.
Google doesn't make these decisions. Some local Directors do when they decide to defund something. Individually each choice might make sense, but in aggregate, maybe not so much. People like to think of big companies as a mobolith, but Google is more like a country full of SMBs and a few bigger ones. The big ones are stable, but SMBs go bust all the time.
Are those local directors not making those decisions in their professional capacity as a Google employee?
Saying "well on the inside it's more like a bunch of little businesses" is missing the point. It has Google's reach, Google's user base, and integration with the Gmail accounts that billions of people use every day. It's a Google product, after all, and those have a long and illustrious history of being really good until they get gunned down for no stated reason.
On a related note, I found my Daydream VR headset the other day. It does, in fact, say "Google" on the box, not "Jim Smith, Manager at Google."
I don’t understand what Google is doing. Their reputation is awful right now.
There’s no scenario under which I can recommend a new (or existing, outside maybe Google Maps, Search and a handful of well established money makers) Google product anymore.
Even consider something like messaging and calling on Android. That is something you would expect Google to support no matter what. And they have. But even in that very simple situation they’ve made people jump through hoops killing and releasing new versions of the same app or renaming apps or shifting people from 1 app to another. You have GChat, Messages, Duo, Allo, GTalk, Hangouts, Meet, new Hangouts all doing 1 of 2 things.
Google doesn't need a good reputation...they just need enough people to use (really: test) it because it's a Google product. And it works because we have a society where mindless diversions with fairly useless things has become a worldwide pasttime, a culture that Google themselves helped create.
I was annoyed by this but I pay for YT Premium already. The music service has more of what I like supplemented by user uploads (great for underground music not readily available on Spotify or w/e), and ad-free YT on all of my devices (looking at you, iPads) is worth it. If the podcasts are integrated well enough then I don't really know if I care that much.
I'm so annoyed by this. I used to listen to my podcasts through Google Play Music. Then they removed podcasts from that app and forced us to install Google Podcasts. Now they are shutting down Google Podcasts and forcing me back to Youtube Music to get my podcasts... Whats next? I'll probably move to a non-google product for podcasts.
I just bought an old dell server and started self-hosting. It saved me some money on a VPS and Dropbox (although this thing GOBBLES electricity, so the savings argument is pretty moot).
Docker (or podman in my case) makes this extremely easy. I can even manage my VMs using virt-manager on my main computer. I solve remote access by having wireguard running on my phone. It uses minimal amounts of data and battery, and I don't have to expose more than one port to the Russians (although lately I have had a bunch of logon attempts from Australia...)
It will make an interesting business school study one day as to whether the Google EOL policy ended up being a net positive or negative for their bottom line.
I would also love to see Google fail and lose its dominance. Google more than any other business is responsible for SEO garbage. It's time for space to be created for newer, smaller solutions.
I use Overcast personally on iOS but, honestly, who cares? It's an app for listening to podcasts. If I switch apps or get a new phone, I go to a directory and repopulate with the podcasts I listen to. There's pretty much zero lock-in.
Man. Google Music and Google Podcast were fine simple apps. I think Music was better than fine actually.
Youtube Music is filled with dark patterns. I use it only because of the music I had already uploaded before and I'm lazy to switch, but it would be a cold day in hell if I used it for podcasts. I switched to antennapod.
Another google product killed. I always remember the catchy googlighting song lol “Google killed of Gears and Wave, they buried to Buzz the same way. If Google Apps meets its grave, your business is hosed” https://youtu.be/vl9S9X9FqyI?si=cb-DXVUaylNhzt6C
101 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] thread[1] https://pocketcasts.com/
But I'm still salty about Google reader!! >:(
You're not alone. I just came here to participate in this candlelight vigil for Google Reader myself.
I liked Beyond Pod, but haven't used it in a long time. The ability to schedule automatic downloads was great when I was more aggressive in reducing cell data usage.
- https://antennapod.org/
- https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod
It's even available on F-Droid.
But it does play the audio.
It's the best full-featured F-droid app in my opinion. I might even rank it second after NewPipe as a top-tier "killer app" on F-Droid.
The author could make the process of adding a YouTube RSS address easier. For example, www.youtube.com could be added as a search option alongside itunes.apple.com and api.ffyd.de.
Add Podcast | Add Podcast by RSS address
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCwWhs_6...
For me it's faster and more flexible to automate all RSS and download tasks on the commandline using custom utilities. Then upload the MP3 files to a folder on the phone so can listen offline using the app.
Add Podcast | Add local folder
If going to be online then just use direct URLs to MP3s. More flexible.
I’m grandfathered in from paying for it when it was a paid app.
https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2019/09/18/major-new-update/
But that's even more of a fun thing from them!
No idea why anyone would pay for this, but damn do I dislike all this subscription stuff.
Anyway, https://overcast.fm have been here for 9 years and no reasons to go anytime soon.
https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod
Antennapod and pocket casts implementations of those features aren't good enough.
For those unaware, you set the speed to something like 1.75x. It analyzes the audio and shortens the time within dead space (e.g., the natural pause between sentences, words, etc)
You can see this happen in real time as the smart speed display updates and you see the rate you’re listening to the podcast goes up to like 2.5x, 3x and even 4x. All because of reducing dead space. It’s insane.
Discussed previously on HN [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852489
It's hard to believe it's been more than 10 years since google Reader was shut down.
1) If the product is successful, they will likely have continued growth and support (via an acquisition or other exit). If the product sucks I don't really want it anyway. With Google, the success of the product doesn't seem aligned to their strategy on when to keep products. There are perfectly viable products with plausibly profitable, high margins, if they were operating a stand-a-lone business that get shut down. The bet is not just on the success of the product, but also google's overall business strategy, which is much more contingent - especially at this point given their track record.
2) Established companies other than google usually do a better job providing an off-ramp to other services, or sell their customer-base to a competitor, rather than shutting down. Google, to their credit, is very good about providing the data so "someone" can manage a migration - they just don't make set up the continuity themselves. Early-stage companies are often bad at this too though.
Alternative take: Those who trust any Google app or service to do anything should reconsider or at the very least keep a permanent and up-to-date contingency plan for when Google inevitably discontinues it.
Fooled you once, shame on Google. Fooled you 294 times, shame on you.
https://killedbygoogle.com
The service I'm sort of amazed is still around is Blogger which is actually a decent option for free blogging.
The even more nuanced take is that that’s a self-perpetuating cycle of Google’s own fault. It‘s constantly killing off stuff, so whatever users any app has feel burned and they are less likely to try Google’s next thing. Which means fewer users, which means the new thing doesn’t take off, so it’s killed. Rinse and repeat.
> I didn't even know Google had a podcast app.
Neither did I. Because I already know it’s not worth investing any time trying any of Google’s stuff and as a consequence pay no attention to their releases, thus I’m never a user. Thus the cycle continues. I’m far from alone in that.
> I'm not sure that keeping apps/services around in some half-dead state maintained by one developer who pissed someone off supporting it is necessarily a better alternative.
Maybe not. Or maybe they need to bite the bullet for a while to regain trust.
I've got an alternate take -- don't depend on _any_ other company's service without a contingency plan for if/when it disappears. Attend to possible lock-in regardless of the source, unless you have direct control over its existence. Nothing is permanent.
At the risk of sounding like a Google apologist, I'll even suggest that I'd rather a company be willing to retire products and move around resources. Especially if the application has limited available growth and there are several alternatives. Holding on to every product like it's precious is how you acquire some very insidious technical debt.
I'm sure there are more than a few of those 294 applications whose time had come for them to go. Were some gone too soon? Perhaps. Some were definitely loved. Does killing off loved products threaten the positive sentiment of users? Of course. But so does stagnation. It's a trade-off decision that neither of us had any ability to alter.
People go on about Google Reader but 1.) There are still RSS readers out there and 2.) It's easier to blame Google than to blame the 99%+ of the population who wouldn't have known what RSS was if it ran over them on the street. It's just not how the mainstream wanted to consume information after social media came along.
Do I think Google could have possibly done a better job with something like Google+ if its DNA were different? Possibly.
Do I think its product strategy around chat and video meetings was hilariously bad? Absolutely, even if Meet and Gchat seem perfectly adequate integrated tools today.
But I also think something like Wave had some innovative ideas that just didn't grab people. I'm not sure they should have kept it around on life support for years.
Agreed. But some companies are higher risk than others. There are apps that I use that I would never have installed or looked at twice if they were made by Google, because the risk of discontinuation is through the roof.
> I'll even suggest that I'd rather a company be willing to retire products and move around resources. (…) Holding on to every product like it's precious is how you acquire some very insidious technical debt.
Again, agreed. But if they’re so lenient with the axe, they should be more selective regarding what goes out in the first place.
> Some were definitely loved. Does killing off loved products threaten the positive sentiment of users? Of course.
And that is exactly why. Soon “everyone” stops trusting your apps and you enter a vicious cycle where nothing ever gets off the ground.
> But so does stagnation.
I never heard anyone complain of Google Reader being stagnant. Or if they did, their voices were drowned by all the ones complaining for the discontinuation. Anecdotally, I’ve felt the same thing with every moderately liked product Google has discontinued.
Google keeps fumbling the opportunity to own large swathes of the web experience while cutting into competitors. Although Google Podcasts probably looked like a minor loss on the quarterly balance sheet, the intangible brand benefits and especially the analytics that could be garnered from having a large population using your product are hard to overstate.
Even apple realized this when they relaunched their podcast app.
To help others you know DeGoogle their life is a public service.
https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle
Half of the recommended alternatives are not even alternatives, like recommending TeX/LaTeX as a Docs recplacement. It's just a no go.
I know the intentions are good but that's not gonna work for the regular userbase outside of the HN and adjacent circles.
>It's an open-source (and offline) document processor using TeX/LaTeX. It's different than Docs or Word but amazing, once you get used to it.
Apple with iCloud also has some basic collaboration features for pages.
Yes, Google docs has become dominant and people use it because it's there. But we'd definitely get along fine without it too.
[1] https://www.lyx.org/
Did you know it takes 6 clicks with a dropdown menu and a window involved to set a piece of text selection bold in Lyx?
Tells a lot, and not in a good way, that some people totally think and believe that this is comparable to Docs, Word, LibreOffice etc.
That is no doubt on purpose as to keep the regulators at bay. Small potatoes aren't worth risking the cash cow over.
I used to LOVE Google products, but I have been burned sooo many times now I am just inclined to not even trying anything Google puts out because they are but a sand mandala in the wind.
About a year ago I had a friend convince me to try Google Domains, despite my better judgement. It was a wonderful experience and within just a couple months, true to form, Google pulled the rug out from me once again, presumably yelling “Gotcha!” while they did so.
Saying "well on the inside it's more like a bunch of little businesses" is missing the point. It has Google's reach, Google's user base, and integration with the Gmail accounts that billions of people use every day. It's a Google product, after all, and those have a long and illustrious history of being really good until they get gunned down for no stated reason.
On a related note, I found my Daydream VR headset the other day. It does, in fact, say "Google" on the box, not "Jim Smith, Manager at Google."
There’s no scenario under which I can recommend a new (or existing, outside maybe Google Maps, Search and a handful of well established money makers) Google product anymore.
Even consider something like messaging and calling on Android. That is something you would expect Google to support no matter what. And they have. But even in that very simple situation they’ve made people jump through hoops killing and releasing new versions of the same app or renaming apps or shifting people from 1 app to another. You have GChat, Messages, Duo, Allo, GTalk, Hangouts, Meet, new Hangouts all doing 1 of 2 things.
How times have changed. I used to get excited about all Google products but now I generally see them all as toxic.
https://podcasting2.org/
Docker (or podman in my case) makes this extremely easy. I can even manage my VMs using virt-manager on my main computer. I solve remote access by having wireguard running on my phone. It uses minimal amounts of data and battery, and I don't have to expose more than one port to the Russians (although lately I have had a bunch of logon attempts from Australia...)
Although arguably speaking I wanted that since 2008/09. Although it took 15 years for the mainstream to gain enough traction on it.
Light footprint, easy to use -- and no reliance on Google or anyone else.
[0] https://github.com/akhilrex/podgrab
Youtube Music is filled with dark patterns. I use it only because of the music I had already uploaded before and I'm lazy to switch, but it would be a cold day in hell if I used it for podcasts. I switched to antennapod.