This would be a great moment for The Onion to run a headline like “Google plans to sunset Gmail, migrate users 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”
Why would you need Gmail? Just share messages through Google docs
Google Play Music users: “
First600th time?”-
Google employee 1: We made podcasts in Play Music better and adoption went up again.
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Google manager: Oh, that’s neat. I’ll make a bullet point on this week’s team meeting.
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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.
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This is why Google will forever be behind Apple. Any app that can’t be monetised gets killed. Why give Android users a stable ecosystem after all? Fuck the users. Google fucking sucks.
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 is Google trying to follow the model of Spotify even though the model is not really successful? I hate when browsing my music in Spotify some podcast pops up. I just want to listen to my music, dammit!
At this point it’s on you if you put any faith in any Google product aside from Search/YT/Adtech to last longer than a couple of years.
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.
Dear Google.
YouTube Music is shit. Stop trying to combine your other services into YouTube music.
Google Play Music was good. Google Podcasts was… not awful
YouTube Music is the worst of both services.
Just stop
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 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.
Fortunately when they killed the podcasts out of Google Play Music I switched to Podcast Addict and never looked back.
I honestly feel bad for the guys assigned to work on this dead-end project.
And considering the buggy, infuriating mess that YTM is and that team is being rewarded with expanded scope, I wonder what dirt they have on Sundar.
Okay, it isn’t just me who find YTM buggy.
As a music player, could it please play music? Jesus.
I have 4 people that use it on my account, it plays music just fine. Makes playlists, finds similar artist, View artist/album on long press, add to current list now or at the end, etc…
Actually has some interesting and unique features (like I can add stuff from youtube app or desktop even to a playlist and it will be in the playlist on TYM later on.)
What does it not do for you?
For starters, it won’t stop raping my data with video plays and downloads, even though I tell it not to do anything without wifi.
It also seems to ‘shuffle’ the same newest 40 songs or so, out of my 1000s of liked songs. Could never understand why, I just want random not algorithm random.
Ahhh, I literally never use the shuffle/random feature so I definitely dont know about that.
If I am on a 20 minutes drive I need the damn thing to keep playing music for 20 minutes, not just randomly stop playing halfway through a song. YTM does that. Spotify doesn’t. Nor does my other background players.
Huh, never had that one I dont think. I wonder what that is
My wife runs into this too but my phone never stops, it’s odd.
I mean GPM was buggy too, but it was just unstable and slow. YTM just has boneheaded bugs. I’ve started running wearing a WearOS watch and it can’t even list more than 100 albums in my library, so I can’t download any albums alphabetically after Love Songs Drug Songs by the X Ambassadors.
I had a fun bug for awhile on GPM were playing my library on shuffle it would mostly play songs that started with P. A 30 minute car ride would have 3 songs that started with P and the other 5-6 would be more random.
Which bugs have you got? I don’t remember any issue, that said the Spotify apps are much better.
Music would randomly stop playing. I can just continue it, no error or warning. Spotify doesn’t do that, nor does other background media players.
Also the fact that the ongoing notification always disappears. YouTube and all other media playing stay there forever. A minute after I’m done playing music, it’s like YTM was never there.
Good news: you never needed Google Podcasts to begin with. Antenna Pod is a Free Open Source app that won’t track your every move and just works.
What an awesome app. Really, it’s unusual to see an open source app be so polished. 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.
I am sorry to hear that. I don’t personally use Android Auto, so that’s a situation I’m not familiar with. I am also sorry to see people downvoting your comment just because you report a bad experience, that doesn’t help anyone.
I would recommend opening an issue about it on the project page in GitHub. Another advantage of FOSS apps is that developers are usually easer to reach for feedback and support, although I must say I don’t have experience with the AntennaPod developers.
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.
Does it work with Android Auto voice commands?
Sorry, I don’t use Android Auto so I don’t know about this feature. You could check on their GitHub page and even open an issue if there is no support.
Do they have a script that they must follow? Why every single time they need to kill a product BEFORE having a fucking replacement???
Why they couldn’t implement podcasts in yt music and then kill Google podcasts?
Why. Every. Single. Time. They need to kill a product BEFORE the replacement is ready???
I’m guessing right now every dev with a podcasting app on the play store is popping champagne from the huge influx of Google podcasts refugees
AntennaPod is great.
Nice! Full support for recommendations in my language!
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.
BeyondPod is paid but pretty decent.
Just use a good podcast app like Pocket Casts. It’s the king on iOS at least, so I assume it’s good on Android as well. I never understood why people keep using these shitty Google apps that always get abandoned.
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
Yes! Although I had to stop using it because it (at least the F-Droid version) refused to work when I disabled Google services on the phone.
All podcast apps are broken, be it Pocket Casts, AntennaPod or the officials one from Apple/Google. I always discover on the go that an episode has been partially downloaded and even though I authorized the download over my data network, it doesn’t resume automatically.
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
Pocket casts has a webapp that works pretty well.
Not sure if you need to pay for it though, I’m grandfathered in
Yeah unfortunately it’s a subscription service now. I’m gonna try castbox and hopefully that works out.
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.
PocketCasts is on Android but it’s not great. Podcast Republic is the absolute best. I’ve tried them all.
“what if we made it so everybody had to pay to turn off their screens even if there was no video or music!”
But… that didn’t and doesn’t apply to YouTube Music, only to YouTube, right?
It’s just as stupid as you fear. Music stops when you close your screen.
Great music player, Google.
I still have Google Listen on my first Android phone. Maybe I can go back…
YT music isn’t even available in my region, these fucks.
A VPN should work but I think downloading music is better
I’m totally on board them getting investigated for antitrust and monopolistic practices. Google has really turned to shit the last 4-5 years.
While I don’t nessesarily hate YT Music (merging Spotify habits with it means I have community uploads and official streams in the same place) this is such a Google move to pull off.