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.
It’s unbelievable that so much of the gsuite on mobile web doesn’t seem to have been even touched in nearly a decade. It’s insane to me that they’re just ignoring that part of their own website even as it’s easily accessible.
On the mail side:
Reporting phishing isn’t something an iOS user would ever do. Desktop please!
Filters? What’re those? To the desktop, come on!
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.
I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.
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.
There’s still no better email client than inbox. It was so fucking good
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+)
Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing “inbox” into the address bar to get to my emails.
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
deleted by creator
Ah ok
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.
👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Antennapod is fine, although it is annoying that there appears to be no way to make it so that it automatically plays the next episode of the podcast you are listening to rather than what you purposefully place into the que.
Antennapod?
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
No Such Thing as a Fish seems like a natural extension for you. It’s a podcast run by the team who writes for QI. It’s funny and informative.
Oh man I used to love watching QI. Forgot all about that show (I’m in the colonies. The one that tossed out all that tea).
Check out Darknet Diaries. High production, in-depth stories on hacking and cyber security. Good for tech-heads and non-tech-heads
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.
Based on Behind The Bastards, check out Knowledge Fight. Dan and Jordan have co-hosted on BtB. They track Alex Jones and Infowars. They’re funny and delightful.
Based on Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, check out The Unbelievable Truth. Hosted by David Mitchell on BBC Radio 4. Very funny celebrity panel show where they tell outrageous lies about a particular topic, but try to snuggle truths undetected past their opponents. Very funny, and there’s years of back catalog to listen to, if you’re so inclined.
“smuggle” not "snuggle "
I don’t know about that with Jim Jeffries is one of my go tos. They see how much Jim knows about a given subject and have an expert in the field listening and grading. It’s funny z and I’ve learned a lot from it too.
Our lists are very similar! I also enjoy “stuff the British stole” and “cautionary tales with Jim Hartford”
- Breaking Down: Collapse
- It Could Happen Here (also by Robert Evans from behind the bastards)
- Popular Front
- S-Town
- The Moth
- Some More News
- Revisionist History
Thank you, subscribed to most, they seem right up my alley.
I was apprehensive about the first two because they sound (from their titles) like the type of conservative conspiracy theory my FIL talks about. He was talking to my BIL (FIL’s stepdaughters husband) about the collapse, and where to go yesterday. He decided Mexico since “they’re only doing all that shit in the industrialized countries” , and I couldn’t help but silently laugh that a.) he thinks Mexico isn’t an industrialized country, and b.) he would illegally immigrate there to avoid politicized chaos.
No problem! I get that about the first two, but they’re really interesting. Of course It Could Happen Here is fiction, but his stories / predictions ended up having quite a few eerie synchronicities to what happened in the years following its release in 2019. Breaking down collapse is much more analytical and heady than conspiratorial. They talk about stuff like why monocultures crops are bad, the decline in insect population, or like how complicated and poorly understood the financial system is and how that sets us up for instability. Their followup podcast is called Building Up: Resilience. I haven’t started it yet, though
Parents man… The other day my dad told me he wanted to watch some new movie because, and this is literally what he said, “it looks violent.” I didn’t know how to respond. Like, I consume media that has violence in it, but as an adult I’d never watch or play something solely for the fact that some dude beats the shit out of people in it? It’s sad.
Hi. I listen to half the podcasts on this list. My favorite podcast is oh no! Ross and Carrie they don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, and claims of the paranormal, but take part themselves. For example, they did a whole series where they joined scientology. They took part in experiments with flatearthers. They go to psychics and then talk about their cold reading techniches etc It’s very funny and they are very nice they don’t go and try to debunk or whatever. They go with genuine curiosity and skepticism. They are on maximum fun which was recently turned into a co-op, I think that’s pretty cool. Other shows I enjoy from max fun are Sawbones, it’s about medical history and judge John Hodgman which is more wholesome fun. Another skeptical podcast I enjoy is Skeptoid, it’s from another network, and has very short episodes every week. Adam Conover’s Factually is also funny and educational
“Search Engine” is essentially the replacement for Reply All, but with just PJ Vogt. It’s really good.
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.
That or Podcast Republic.
Love it!
Switched to Antennapod when abandoning Spotify recently. It’s been great! Way better interface than Spotify’s embarrassingly horrible UI.
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 still miss Google reader
You might enjoy feedly
Yeah, this was the only Google product that I really liked, and of course they’re killing it just to force people to use YouTube Music. AntennaPod is an open-source alternative that functions very similarly, I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and I’m very happy with it.
Yeah, that’s where I ended up, too. At least Google had the decency to support OPML export so I didn’t have to redo my subscriptions manually.
Yeah, that was decent of them. I was expecting some sort of dark pattern bullshit to make exporting to a third-party extra hard, but it was actually pretty simple.
Those features will never be implemented. Just like with Google Music.
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.
I’ve been using ‘Pocket Casts’ on Android for years. Highly recommend it.
They finally open sourced the app, but for some reason, they can’t figure out how to submit it to F-Droid. This is so annoying.
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
wow what a shit show in the comments
Yeah but that price jump is nuts. I’m sure there’s something out there 70% as good for 10% of the price.
That’d be Antenna Pod. It’s (IMO) not as good as Pocket Casts, but FOSS is always good.
The thing that keeps me on Pocket Casts is really just the superior queue management. I’ll keep checking back on Antenna Pod though
Amazing thank you. I’ve got the one-year-of-older-price thing for people who were already subscribed.
But seeing as how I don’t use any of the features… when that’s gone I will be unlikely to renew.
I’ve been plugging it too, but apparently new users have to pay monthly fees to use it? Maybe there are now better alternatives.
This is not true. The app is free and has no listening limits.
What you can pay for is a web player (for pc), cross device syncing, cloud storage, extra themes, and some other perks.
Been using pocket casts for like 7 years now with no complaints.
I’ve been pretty happy with how Automattic has handled PocketCasts and the premium features feel like what you’d expect, while the main product is perfectly usable for 90% of people and use cases. I hope with their acquisition of Beeper, they continue this mindset and add premium features (extra themes, premium stickers, etc) without compromising the main app.
Damn :(
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.
My problem is when they kill services that are default installations on Android, then never remove them from the OS image.
I’m looking at you Allo.
Plugging Podcast Addict. I don’t even use the paid version, but it is awesome!
Been using this one for a decade and it does everything I need it to.
I’m just making sure I live up to its name:
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/
Same here. Had it for years and it’s always been great. Eventually paid for Pro to support them.
My almost 7,000 hours of podcasts listened through Podcast Addict since 2019 would agree
PocketCasts is good.
Good app but they got bought and immediately upped their price by a lot from what I recall. It’s why I moved on. I think it was a more than 3x price hike in the US and as much as 5x elsewhere.
Shame because their desktop option is tied to that subscription. I couldn’t justify paying that much just to swap phone/desktop.
I still use them since i got grandfathered into the pro plan (or whatever its called) without having to pay for a subscription. Not sure if i would pay for it now if i had to.
However, still a really good service for the cost to sync podcasts across lots of devices for anyone who listens to a lot.
Ah, the free plan meets my needs so I didn’t notice the price increase.
I’m glad they open sourced it, but I’m waiting for an F-Droid release. It seems like they’re struggling with this, it took them months and still nothing happened
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/424
