When Stitcher shut down I briefly considered this app as an alternative but I said, no. These guys can’t be trusted to stick around. So no surprise here but thanks clamman for sharing it.
I had the same calculation a while ago. The feature where you could resume a podcast on my phone and Google Home speaker was tempting, but I stuck with Pocket Casts, which I just feel is more invested in their product. And the idea of listening to podcasts on Youtube is just not for me. Same reason I’ve never wanted podcasts on Spotify; podcast listening is something I want separate, not mixed with music.
What did you switch to? I need a decent podcast app… I currently use Google podcasts. I used to use castbox, but the ads became unbearable.
Not who you asked, but I use podbean and have recently started using antennapod. Both are really good, but antennapod is open source from what I understand, and I’ve been able to find more podcasts on it. Only gripes with it are that you can’t rate the podcasts on it, and you can’t set it play all episodes of a certain podcast automatically. You have to add them to a queue manually and play from the queue. Other than that it’s absolutely fantastic.
Pocket casts is really good, but their premium pricing has really climbed recently (device syncing, better organization options, and desktop/web clients). AntennaPod is almost as good and FOSS if that matters to you.
I’ve been using Pocket Casts for years. It’s pretty solid. Honestly can’t remember if I paid for it or not, but I don’t see ads and I don’t have the recurring membership option.
+1 for Pocket Casts
The apps are now free and open source. You only need to pay (monthly) if you want the web app and account sync.
You know, it is a running joke that Google keeps killing their products within a few years or so after release. but with all seriousness, it makes me not trust any product they release because I have no idea if it’ll even be around a year later.
Dear Google, stop trying to make YT Music happen. It’s not going to happen.
Just downloaded AntennaPod
I happen to use YT Music despite it sucking because I already pay for YouTube premium, and it seemed dumb to pay for Spotify or Tidal instead. Plus I hated what Spotify was doing by trying to combine music and podcasts into a single app. So naturally, a few years later Google is combining music and podcasts into a single app.
A few years ago, before Google introduced YouTube music, they had the Google Play Music app that let you listen to their entire catalog, download/cache the songs beforehand, listen to your own audio files on local storage (including .flac files), and subscribe and listen to Podcasts.
Literally was one of my most used apps until YouTube Music happened and they had less features for double the price.
@greyjedi @GamingChairModel Google Podcasts is being killed off and everything moved to YouTube Music. I won’t be moving with it.
+1 for AntennaPod, has tons of options but also gets out of your way if all you want to do is find and listen to podcasts.
I can’t see Google ever adding in all the options people want in a podcast app into YouTube Music, it’s just never going to happen.
I would expect they’ll probably use it to try and switch you over to the video version (if it exists) since it’s going to have the more expensive ads (I assume the video ads are more lucrative anyways), which isn’t overall a bad thing, but also not really a good one either.
GP Music wasn’t too bad. I wish Apple would bring an iTunes client to Android, or at least if there were a decent comparable product (that supports streaming+purchasing music as I actually prefer to buy the songs I like).
Locking people into the streaming model is lame
Comes with YT Premium, so not sure why I’d use anything else. Can’t say I love the app though. Seems to get worse with each update.
Do people generally like having their podcasts and music on the same app? I never understood why so many music apps added podcasts.
I do. It helps to have it all in one place. Also since I’m paying for Spotify, I’m glad I’m not paying for another separate podcast service, and it feels like I get my money’s worth. Probably listen to a good 3-4 hours of podcasts per week and another 20-30 hours of music. If I was JUST doing podcasts, I’d probably use another service but it’s nice to have it all in one place that behaves the same for me in the car.
Why would you pay for a podcast service?
There are a bunch of podcast client apps that are free to use, some are open source, and they are utilizing indices such as podcastindex.org to give you access to podcasts.
Because there is a lot of shared stuff… so it’s cheap to be added to the app, that’s why.
Man Google is on a roll, one of the few of their apps I kept after de-googling in the last few months from most things, now I can add this to an alternative. Thanks G!
