Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 with listeners migrated to YouTube Music

'No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Business Where This Regularly Happen

"Google plans to require a YouTube Premium subscription to allow users to search while minimized, industry leak claims"

I think that one might cause some real pandemonium in that far too many people would think it’s legit.

Why would you need Gmail? Just share messages through Google docs

I never really explored non-FOSS podcast services, did it offer anything in particular over something like AntennaPod? Is some content exclusive?

I loved Google play music as a locker for my owned music and a a storefront to buy what I wanted. YouTube Music made me abandon it completely and move my owned music onto my plex server.

Why does Google have to ruin everything? Still bitter about Google Reader closing back in the day. That was the beginning of the end of me having confidence in their services and moving to self hosting as much as I can.

As someone who loves Google Podcasts this sucks. Fuck YouTube Music and I miss my Google Music.

As a YouTube Music subscriber (because of yt premium): "stop trying to make YouTube music a thing. It's not going to happen".

What is the complaint about YouTube music. I got it for free and it’s pretty good. Maybe not perfect but I don’t big beef about it.

To be fair the Apple podcast app kind of sucks too, its just the most convenient one to use since it comes pre installed.

It's not like podcast players are particularly complex to build and maintain, so they don't require that much cashflow. Podbean sustains itself quite well with the odd image ad and AntennaPod is FOSS. I think the problem is more the opposite, since competition is so easy and monetising it would suck interest out of it, Google has no interest in actually competing. Which is why they're trying to build their own walled garden with uploading your podcasts only directly to YouTube, RSS feeds be damned.

Why are they forcing users to YouTube Music anyway? They could improve the product before killing all of their other services.

YouTube Music doesn’t even remember where you left off. Switch to your phone? Music queue is gone. Close the tab? Music queue is gone. Anything other than an algorithm curated playlist will make you have a shit experience on YouTube Music.

Exactly. YT Music of such a trash interface compared to Google Play Music that I actually bothered to try Spotify when they killed GPM. They're not accomplishing their goals here

I've been using it since I switched to Android about 10 years ago, and while it took some time to get the UX right, I really couldn't recommend it more now.

What an awesome app. Really, it's unusual to see an open source app be so polished. Thanks for the recommendation.

I never knew about this app, thanks for the recommendation!

Doesn't just work for me. When I'm playing a podcast on Android auto, leave the car, come back, there's no way to resume the podcast.

On every other app, there's a little floating icon in the bottom right of the screen that you tap to get to the now playing, so you can resume, but antenna pod doesn't have that.

Does it work with Android Auto voice commands?

I love that one. And also PocketCast.

• Google employee 1: We made podcasts in Play Music better and adoption went up again.

• Google manager: Oh, that's neat. I'll make a bullet point on this week's team meeting.

• Google employee 2: We spent many millions on a new podcast app and servers, engineering, data migration, PR, integrations and adoption is lower. Actually, nobody wanted it or cares or likes it.

• Google VP: Everyone this can't fail. Pick the best looking metrics, prepare a series of announcements and get ready for a wave of promotions and it's all thanks to this superstar manager who's definitely getting a huge bonus and double promotion so I can spin this like it was a win. The best part? Get ready for a repeat when we replace this again in 2 to 3 years.

AntennaPod is great.

Go for AntennaPod. FOSS and works great

It's still up right now, they plan to kill it by 2024 and YTMP will supposedly be online by then. I suppose this has to do with reallocating their developers and avoiding redundant apps. Not that they're consistent with the latter.

Uuuh, podcasts have been available in YouTube music for a while.

one suggestion: pocketcasts

BeyondPod is paid but pretty decent.

Best case scenario: They forget about whatever product you like and it's allowed to continue running for years with zero updates.

Most likely scenario: They kill it off to merge into another product line that overlaps with a third of the features only to do the exact same thing again within a year or two.

I decided to cancel both. YT Music deleted my music that they don't have in their global library, and they fucked up the sorting of my liked playlist. Going back to buying music a la carte and storing it myself.

I sometimes decide to try out YouTube Music for playing some of the music I have saved on YT in a more music focused UI.

Then I go back straight back to regular YouTube, because half the songs/music can't be played in YT Music (including offical music on official channels).

I feel like I get some good value out of YT Premium, but I don't understand YT Music.

But… that didn't and doesn't apply to YouTube Music, only to YouTube, right?

Okay, it isn't just me who find YTM buggy.

As a music player, could it please play music? Jesus.

I recommend Pocket Casts.

I've been using Podcast Republic for a while and it's solid. Works great with AA.

I have premium and I can't use Youtube without video on Android auto. That needs to change.

Why? That one actually makes sense to consolidate.

YouTube Music allows the app to be minimized, AFAIK.

It's standard YouTube (non-premiun) that requires the app to be in the foreground.

Does Google Podcasts really not support that? Because that's like... the basics.

InnerTune. No ads, no account. Minimize/do what you want.

AntennaPod is great, free, and has no ads. Pretty sure it's open source too.

I've been using Pocket Casts for years. Works great.

PodcastAddict is my go-to, with the caveat that it's absolutely chock full of nerd knobs.

To copy Spotify?

Or to satiate the soul harvester at the Google Graveyard.

AntennaPod on Android. I use Pocket Casts but only because I’m on iOS, once I switch back to Android I’m going back to AntennaPod, it’s open source and imo easier to customise than any other podcast app and I went through a lot of them trying to find the one that doesn’t try to force it’s terrible ux on you

I originally switched from Podcast Addict to Google Podcasts for seamless integration when listening to podcasts directly on Google Home devices. Hopefully this means better Google Home integration with popular third-party podcast apps, but it probably just means we'll be forced to use YouTube Music instead. :-/

The one thing I liked about Google podcasts was the parity between pc and android. Now I gotta find a similar podcast app to do the same

Mind you I love pocket casts but I always have had the need to install another podcast app such as Google podcasts, castbox or fountain to have a search that works beyond the show name at the level of episode names.

Sometimes I love listening to various podcasts about a topic or I'm just curious and use it like an user uses youtube search.

Pocket Casts isn't on Android. I kept hearing it brought up when I was looking to replace DoggCatcher and went with Podcast Addict. Took Google so long to finally allow people to manually add feeds from URL. Which was why I never really used it unless just wanting to stream an old ep of a listed show randomly. So when they added that ability, I was happy to see they seemed to be kind of supporting it seriously. But I was already moved to PA and am glad to not gone with Google.

I liked their original Listen app for being ridiculously bare bones and no ads or anything that requires more data. But they killed that long ago. I am not sure if Google just loves to create trust issues with users. Or if they just really have self esteem issues and can only act in dramatic ways that don't make sense.

Yup same here. It's also made me realise I don't ever want to be tied into a platform anymore.

I've been moving cloud, passwords, email, accounts, podcasts, notes, news etc all to platforms or services that are either selfhosted or are easily exportable and can be backed up for access into another platform.

A VPN should work but I think downloading music is better

+1 for Pocketcasts

I ended up recovering some of my music using Google takeout which in turn absolutely wrecked most of the tags on my songs.

My migrated music from Google Play seems to be in the "Library" section of Youtube Music.

Overcast is iPhone only? You were using Google podcasts on your iPhone?

If you only listen to podcasts on your phone, I can highly recommend AntennaPod. It is free and open source. I have been using it for around 6 months now since Pocket Casts increased from $10 to $40 per year.

Is it subscription now? I paid like $3 for it once ten years ago.

pocket cast is free to use, no?

I like AntennaPod.

I used to use PodcastAddict, before my work replaced my perfectly functional Galaxy 10 with a used iPhone SE. Not sure that one exists anymore, but I loved it.

Podcast Republic is my go to. I listen to 5 or 6 podcasts. But have 2 or 3 that are time relevant, like news. I set those as priority, and Podcast Republic makes an auto playlist that puts them all in order by my preference, then release date old to new.

If a preferred podcast comes out, it goes to the top of my auto playlist. I can't podcast without it now.

Last I checked, Google does not have that feature. There's an open-source project to extract them for you, though: https://github.com/lucasrangit/google-podcasts-export-opml

I started hunting for a new podcast platform when Stitcher announced they were shutting down earlier this year, and I settled on Podurama. It's the only one I can use on any platform, including desktop Linux (via the web version, which is actually quite good). I can subscribe to private feeds (e.g. from Patreon subscriptions), it syncs play history in my account, and it allows me to mark episodes played in bulk so manually porting over my listening history was not as big an ordeal as in other apps/platforms.

I'm using it for free, though they do offer a paid version with some very minimal additional features.

Edit: I would much prefer an open-source solution, but I have yet to find one that works across platforms and syncs between all devices. Open to suggestions if I missed anything good. At minimum I need an Android client and web client (or if they actually make apps for Mac/Windows/Linux/Android and somehow don't have a web client, that's fine too, but that seems unlikely).

You might be able to grab them from takeout.google.com

I think so, too 😀. I much preferred Google Play Music. I also hate that I now get music recommendations when I'm trying to watch TV.

That seems plausible.

May I ask why?

Personally, I find its UI/UX is annoying. The quality of the sound is awesome, though.

I started using Pocket Casts last year when it was $10 per year. This year they first raised it to $15 per year, and now it is $40 per year. That is too much in my opinion. I've had enough with services that nearly always get worse, so I am now using AntennaPod. It is a free open source Android app that doesn't need accounts or subscriptions.