This week’s dead Google products: Google Podcasts, basic Gmail, and more!

Leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show to Technology@lemmy.world – 362 points –
This week’s dead Google products: Google Podcasts, basic Gmail, and more!
arstechnica.com
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As a point of order, AntennaPod doesn't "have" any podcasts; they're all publicly available in a web standard RSS format, so you can get those podcasts on any podcast aggregator/player like Overcast, Podcast Addict, or (my personal favorite) Pocket Casts. In that vein, I recommend choosing your podcast player based on features, not availability.

Google Podcasts also supported entering RSS feeds manually.

Yeah, but what I'm trying to say is that, functionally, that's really all podcasts are. Google Podcasts (and many other podcast aggregators) glosses it over with some really shiny interface that lets you find shows better, and Spotify locks those RSS feeds behind a paywall, but at its core that's all a podcast is. So AntennaPod doesn't "also have them," they're the exact same product.

Ah true. Companies are great at hiding the open web that they (ab)use.

Otoh, Spotify (and probably apple and other big corps) don't even allow you to add RSS URLs, so I wanted to point out they Google was one of the big players which was more open.

Actually Apple does allow it, but yeah, Spotify is a bad citizen here. I only used Google Podcasts once or twice, but good on them for giving the option. At least for as long as they were around.

Not at launch. Google Play Music did, iirc, which is why I switched to Podcast Addict when GPM lost podcast support and they launched Google Podcasts. People complaining that Google Podcasts is another incidence of "Google replaced a good app with a bad one" are missing the detail that this is also Google Podcasts' origin story. Get off the treadmill.

I do feel genuinely bad for any developers who had to work on a dead-end product like that though.