fuck it, do gmail next, force me to find a proper provider
who exactly thinks it's good that things are this ephemeral? what's the point of even using and enjoying and getting invested in something when they constantly pull this shit?
That's why I never used it, because I knew it will happen. Better to use some other solution. I wish there was a third party option to google chromecast and all the home devices that works as well.
Another service that I didn't know google even offered until they announced it was dying. There are so many sources that podcast apps can pull from that we don't need half as many as we have.
I use it, I like it and it works with zero issues. It also easily works with my Google Home speaker. So of course it gets shut down. Because obviously. Sigh.
That said, Pocket Casts on iOS is also quite decent.
Google seems to be caught in an awful feedback loop. I feel like at this point, most tech savy people are weary to try new Google services for fear of liking them, but eventually getting shutdown. In turn causing those tech savy users to not recommend it to their friends/family that actually might cause it to grow.
Honestly don't know how they get out it without either losing tons of money on maybe side projects or happening across the one things that's so good it's impossible to not use. The latter seems more unlikely by the day
I learned with Google music never get involved with Google with something you'll want to use daily. Google music hands down was the absolute best music service I've ever used. Google is like a kid with ADHD bouncing around from project to project never to see them through.
Years ago, Google shut down services I used and since then, I don’t get involved in anything they put out there on the market. This will include their AI service.
Only thing they are allowed to provide me is email. I’m even using YT and search drastically less.
Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service
I have a Gmail account that catches/forwards stuff now and again that I signed up for over a decade ago, before I used a password manager and kept track of everything, and YouTube. A Google store line of credit, too, for pixels. Everything else I've migrated to my own website, or my own 'cloud'.
There was a big issue with Google Store/Fi Store a few years ago where devices were being 'lost' in transit, and it ended up being FedEx employees stealing them and resealing the packages. But Google's handling of the situation was absolutely shit, and two years of reading horror stories usually around bf or the holidays, drove me to migrate my account, one service at a time, to somewhere I could actually control and trust - as it is well-known that if you do a chargeback on G, they axe your gPay access, which means you can't buy or pay for anything: drive/photo storage, gOne, devices, apps/music/movies/games/books, app subscriptions, pay your bill on Fi or gDomains... and if it happened to me, I would not sit quietly with no device for weeks or months while G put the blame and suspicion on me. Fuck all that. Chargeback baby, it's not gonna be my problem anymoreeeee~
Took me from an outspoken G fanboy to 'run the fuck away' within 24 months, and all it took was stories of other's being treated like shit and being on the hook for hundreds or a thousand+ dollar devices, over and over, while support did fuck-all and the actual people 'investigating' were not accessible by any means.
This is ofc on top of G axing shit because they feel like it. Run your own mini server, own your data, don't be at the non-existant mercy of a massive soulless corporation.
Now, a new support article details Google's plans to kill the product, with a shutdown coming in April 2024.
I think all the core podcast features exist somewhere, but they are buried in several menus.
There are more podcast-centric features sequestered away in YouTube Music, where a button with the very confusing label "Save to library" will subscribe to a podcast feed.
Music is a different interface, site, and app, so none of these billions of YouTube viewers are seeing these podcast features.
But this is the future of Google's podcast content, so the company is plowing ahead with it.
If you're looking to get off Google's wild ride and want something straightforward that works across platforms, I recommend Pocket Casts.
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I use Spotify for my podcasts, but I will never check out YouTube Music podcasts. Having 2 ads before the start of a podcast as if I'm watching a YouTube video is just unacceptable for me.
Other than being relieved when they removed the podcast from Google play music (after shoehorning it into the GPM app for no good reason), I didn't really use this much. Pocketcasts has pretty much always done what I needed.
To their credit, at least they're still trying to build stuff. Microsoft avoids this problem by no longer innovating and just buying into whatever is trending. (Not that Google also isn't doing the same). If you never build anything new, you never risk killing a product that didn't trend, which happens a lot.