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.

  • youngalfred@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago

    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?

    • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • foggenbooty@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          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.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        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.

    • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
      1·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    So I’ve been using it on YouTube music and now podcasts suck just as much as when it had Google Music merged.

    Now when i just want to listen to my single daily morning podcast, I have to remember to turn the damn thing off because it constantly wants to autoplay random podcasts I have no desire to listen to in the first place. Just ends up throwing my mood off for the day sometimes when it plays some crap that annoys me.

    • Muffi@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      Switched to Antennapod when abandoning Spotify recently. It’s been great! Way better interface than Spotify’s embarrassingly horrible UI.

    • Forklift Certified@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      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 )

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      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

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        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.

  • rbesfe@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    Friendly reminder that YouTube music STILL doesn’t have the ability to sort songs in a playlist alphabetically

  • fuckingkangaroos@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I just ignore any new Google service these days. Unreliability isn’t even as much of a concern as privacy.

  • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    This is exactly why I never started using this app. Not worth investing my time. Still on Pocket Casts for years

  • niisyth@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    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.

    👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼

    • xyguy@startrek.websiteEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        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.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            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 ecosystem battery farm.

            I’m not sure on GSuite.

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I moved to Podcast Republic, and sometimes AntennaPod, on Android, Downcast on iPhone, and just import the OPML from one of those into gpodder to listen on desktop/laptop.

    No accounts or other BS to keep up with, just the latest OPML export. Much nicer, and no one can take it away from me or “shut the service down” in the future.

  • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Googles antics with its service killing is what lead me to trying out the Apple walled garden.

    Now I just need to quit Gmail somehow, sometime.

  • A_Porcupine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    This is weird marketing, why not just say “we’re merging Google podcast and YouTube music into one app”?

  • pjwestin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • cosmicrookie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    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

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      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.