Google Podcasts shutting down in 2024 for YouTube Music

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 421 points –
Google Podcasts shutting down in 2024 for YouTube Music
9to5google.com
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Man, I really did like Google Podcasts.

It was way better than the other podcast apps. And coming from iTunes, it was a smooth transition.

This sucks. Open source your shit, Google, and I promise we'll keep it going.

Would be nice if more companies just open sourced the stuff they don't need or don't want to maintain anymore.

Even if no one picks it up, at least it got another chance.

Obviously I can't know what you have tried before, but I'd highly recommend Pocket Casts. I've been using this since at least 2014 (looking at a support chain that I had opened) and can't imagine losing the features they've got. It's shifted owners a few times and their mobile apps are now open source should you be interested in that.

Worth noting that in October they're increasing their annual subscription price from $9.99 to $39.99, which is when I'll be finding another podcast app. I love Pocket Casts but it doesn't provide $40 worth of functionality for me.

Yea, using their app online is worth $10 a year, but $40? For what's basically a front end? They are out of their mind.

Do you know if you can export your podcasts from Pocket casts?

I'm not sure what you would export, just your listening history and favorites? Pocket Casts doesn't host the actual audio files themselves, those are all available elsewhere online. I doubt there's an easy way to port your existing subscriptions and such to another app, that would require them all to use a standard format for that data and there's not really any incentive for that.

Yea, I figured out how to export it, but it doesn export what episodes I've.listened to, so I have to go back through my lists and transfer that (I like listening to back catalogs of my favorite podcasts.

I actually paid for the lifetime app membership a long time ago, so luckily this won't impact that, but not paying $40usd for just desktop use.

Does Antenna have a desktop app?

Not as far as I know. You would have to use a desktop client that syncs with gPodder... like gPodder

Didn't know that was a thing! Thanks for the link.

Is pocket casts usable on pc? The "pocket" part of the name makes me think no, but I used Google podcast to listen to stuff on my pc primarily. It's a pain to track podcasts I want to listen to and am actively listening to because every podcast company has their own website.

They have a website version but it's a paid offering, with it being part of a subscription now. It used to be a one-off purchase. Regardless, I haven't used it before.

Podcasts didn't work with SD cards, yt music does, can't say I'll miss it.

What value would oss bring here when it's the content that matters most? I'm actually really interested to know because I too really liked this app/service.

Podcasts are (generally, Spotify excluded) on an open standard. They're just RSS feeds. So, the content can be aggregated by anyone. So it's primarily the UI that will be different between different podcast players.

Sure but the hosting of that content isn't something a front end can solve.

Podcasts are already hosted by a variety of independent services. Google doesn't host any podcasts, at least as far as I am aware. In this case it really is a frontend-only problem.

The RSS feed points to the already hosted files. A lot of people host podcasts on services like libsyn or podbean. I don't think you can really host podcasts on Google; maybe hacked together on drive or something.

Google isn't hosting the podcasts.

Most of them are hosted by a service offered by Spotify.

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