Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service.
Ahh, another one for the ol’ Google Graveyard.
I switched to Antennapod already. Nothing to complain about.
AntennaPod is amazing, literally my favorite app ever
Great. Now use kasts and Antenna Pod
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Google killing a product? No way
Who did they kill?
The joke was that we’re Google’s products.
I liked yer joke :c
Ah got ya, I imagined there was a joke I there but it flew over my head lol. Good one though
Nah they done it before with chat
Your sarcasm detector requires calibration.
That’s why I never used it, because I knew it will happen. Better to use some other solution. I wish there was a third party option to google chromecast and all the home devices that works as well.
I just gave up and attached a small form factor PC to my TV.
Steam Deck ftw.
It is my everything. Seriously.
What are you using for control? I wouldn’t mind scrapping my Roku for something a little more robust but using a mouse and keyboard on my home television seems kind of …awful.
A Trackball is a lot better than a mouse.
That said, I haven’t found anything beats both.
They make mini keyboard/trackball things but they’re all such low quality crap.
I picked up a Logitech K400, it’s working well enough for now. I’m still evaluating the best use cases and access methods for everything but it’s good enough for when I need to just toss a browser up on my screen. Much more convenient than going to my PC in another room to cast a tab; I got tired of getting off the couch just b/c a stream needs to be refreshed.
Thanks for the response
Yeah, I have one of those at work on a central presentation machine. It does ok
Maybe my problem is more getting away from windows and moving to kodi or something. Trying to run a regular desktop GUI from across the room is just an uncomfortable thing.
FWIW I’m dealing with that issue, too. You can size things up and make it work okay but it’s not an amazing experience. I’m also looking at an alternative UI since the vast majority of what I want it for is browser based. I’m exploring some flavors of linux, but I have yet to encounter something that gives me the TV-like interface with PC functionality behind the scenes.
Pocketcasts is great and supports Chromecast
Thanks, I know.
I can’t speak for the rest of the home products, but Roku is a pretty good alternative to Chromecast
I hate that all the TCL TVs this year changed from Roku and Google this year to just Google. Give me some variety and competition. Also, I like their simpler out-of-the-box interface better with less ads and such, even though the Google TV interface is more customizable.
ROKU TV HAS ADS AS WELL?
Hoo BOY does Roku have ads! When I installed PiHole on my network and used it as my local DNS, the TOP blocked domain was “scribe.roku.com”. It was calling home like 5000 times a day. We were thinking every single remote push maybe.
Blocking those domains made the entire interface speed up drastically, and got rid of the giant box ads on the side as well. (It’s just a big empty frame now lol).
Rokus are nice and cheap if you can mitigate their rampant data harvesting.
Yes they do. Usually one big ad on the side of the screen. And they may if you use certain screen savers. I think the city scapes one puts ads in it. Note: all the ads I mention are static images without sound.
Is there any TV software without ads that works well?
I learned with Google music never get involved with Google with something you’ll want to use daily. Google music hands down was the absolute best music service I’ve ever used. Google is like a kid with ADHD bouncing around from project to project never to see them through.
I used it from the start, I got in on the beta, and while it was nice, I wouldn’t say “it was the absolute best”. IMO Spotify is just as good, in fact I’d say it’s better. It was nice that you could upload 20,000 of your own songs, but that was back before we had hundreds of gigs available on our phones.
Why do you consider it “the absolute best”?
As a former Google Play Music user and lover, it was the recommendations. I haven’t found another service that shows me even a significant fraction of the music I like that Google did. I’ve switched to Spotify but it constantly recommends songs I’ve already heard or don’t like and the shuffle feature gives me the same ~50 songs from a large playlist. It’s something I’ve accepted but I miss the Google recommendations deeply.
I’m the opposite, I never really used GPM’s recommendations because I knew what I liked and had tons of ripped CDs in my collection. After we all ditched MP3s and went to streaming I still stuck with what I knew. I only switched to Spotify about 2 years ago and it has opened me up to a bunch of smaller artists in Europe (I’m in the US) that I would have never found on my own. One of them (Green Lads) I’ve listened to for 2500 hours this past year thanks to their recommendations.
Have you tried Pandora? I always thought Pandora was better at recommending music than GPM was, but it was close.
For me it was the ability to upload my own library and stream it without a subscription, I ended up switching to plex and running my own server for a while but yeah Spotify just has the best deal with no effort so I caved to that especially with a family plan you can’t beat it.
IIRC Play Music was a paid service, it probably had a free tier with ads/commercials, but I definitely paid for it. That’s how I got grandfathered into YouTube Premium (when they launched YouTube Red as it was called it came “free” with the subscription to Play Music) and can’t go back to the free tier or deal with the various hacked clients and ad blockers. It’s been over a decade of ad-free YouTube (except for the sponsor segments everyone does now, I do use SmartTube on my Nvidia Shield to skip those).
Yeah I think at some point they started subscriptions but you were able to keep your old library from before
Yet another Google product that goes into the grave.
virtually everything that Google developed in-house was a failure. Videos, social media, WiFi balloons, smart cities. They couldn’t even keep an RSS reader running.
How companies this incompetent became multibillion dollar monopolies is a mystery to me.
If you rewind the video a minute or two he explains that.
I didn’t watch the video. Too busy watching other videos. Sad.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?t=14m36s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Which is why I’ll never use a Google product. Well except for gmail. I don’t have a choice because of work.
Time to get out of Google
Podcastsfor anyone that is still using the serviceI have a Gmail account that catches/forwards stuff now and again that I signed up for over a decade ago, before I used a password manager and kept track of everything, and YouTube. A Google store line of credit, too, for pixels. Everything else I’ve migrated to my own website, or my own ‘cloud’.
There was a big issue with Google Store/Fi Store a few years ago where devices were being ‘lost’ in transit, and it ended up being FedEx employees stealing them and resealing the packages. But Google’s handling of the situation was absolutely shit, and two years of reading horror stories usually around bf or the holidays, drove me to migrate my account, one service at a time, to somewhere I could actually control and trust - as it is well-known that if you do a chargeback on G, they axe your gPay access, which means you can’t buy or pay for anything: drive/photo storage, gOne, devices, apps/music/movies/games/books, app subscriptions, pay your bill on Fi or gDomains… and if it happened to me, I would not sit quietly with no device for weeks or months while G put the blame and suspicion on me. Fuck all that. Chargeback baby, it’s not gonna be my problem anymoreeeee~
Took me from an outspoken G fanboy to ‘run the fuck away’ within 24 months, and all it took was stories of other’s being treated like shit and being on the hook for hundreds or a thousand+ dollar devices, over and over, while support did fuck-all and the actual people ‘investigating’ were not accessible by any means.
This is ofc on top of G axing shit because they feel like it. Run your own mini server, own your data, don’t be at the non-existant mercy of a massive soulless corporation.
Same shit happened when the Steam Deck released in 2022 as well. A bunch of them disappeared into FedEx. Fortunately, Valve promptly took care of anyone who was affected.
For a company that seems to want customers, they sure seem to also hate customers.
I know it sounds like a cliche, but you are not Google’s customer. You are a “user” and Google sells users to their customers. Your data and attention are their products.
So when I buy a phone from Google, I’m…? A customer. In my opinion, and probably some legal sense as well. I’m also their user, sure. But if I purchase something I’m a customer.
There is a small sliver of Google that wants you as a customer. Maybe that’s the sliver that makes the Pixel line, but Pixel phones are not Google’s business, Google’s business is acquiring your information and selling it or leveraging it to increase ad revenue. Google is not a hardware company, though they sell hardware. Google is not an entertainment company, though they will sell you movies and music. Google is not a consumer software company, though they do provide software and services targeted at consumers and businesses. Google is an advertising company. If you buy hardware from them, and you like it, that’s great, but they are less concerned about your experience as an end-user than they are about acquiring your data to further their ad sales. If making a quality experience for you as a user Improves the likelihood of acquiring more data, they improve the quality of your experience. But if an improved experience hampers their ability to acquire more revenue through ad sales, they will hamper your experience or shut down a product that isn’t directly increasing their data collection and add sales. See: rolling everything content related into the YouTube brand and increasingly hampering the experience of those who use ad blockers or privacy focused browsers.
You may consider yourself a customer of Google, but until you’re giving them millions of dollars every quarter, you are just a user. Google’s profits from every hardware device they’ve ever sold is just a rounding error on a single quarter of the massive amounts of money they make selling ads.
I mean… Okay. But they’re still begging us for money. YouTube and Google are asking us for subscriptions to many of their services, like YouTube premium, Google One Drive, etc. So yes, I do consider myself a customer no matter the percentage of their revenue I make up.
they are less concerned about your experience as an end-user than they are about acquiring your data
I guess this is my issue, as a customer, with them. I’m not willing to pay for garbage customer support and customer relations.
I have a few accounts for this purpose. I know at least one service I’ve had forwarded for years.
I jumped ship from most g- products years ago. I really should log into my accounts again and have anything necessary sent directly to my real email.
Another one in the Google graveyard.
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FFS Google’s killing another app I use all the time
At this rate I half expect Google Play books to be dead before 2025
I’ll never forgive them for killing iGoogle. I missed my start page so much…
YouTube Podcasts coming to the YouTube Music app delivered to you by the Google Play game delivery app!
*being shut down in 2025
I’ve tried to listen to some podcasts on YouTube music. It really doesn’t work well compared to Pocket Casts. They need to separate the music and podcasts more clearly and make managing podcast playlists more intuitive
My favorite part of YT Music is how it’s a terrible interface for YT videos. Second favorite part is the total mixing of music playlists and video playlists.
Is there a way to download any books bought as pdfs?
I don’t believe so
I tried to figure out how to through the app but I unfortunately couldn’t find anything
Or even download them so I can view them outside of the play app?
Selfhost Audiobookshelf
I’ll have to check this out for sure as I primarily listen to audiobooks rather than reading physical books or reading ebooks
They’re just so much more convenient with my shitty work schedule
I buy all my ebooks on Google Play and then export them via ACSM converter and back it up (you can only convert and exported file once)
Sounds smart might give it a go, but why not simply download epub direct from an ebooks retailer?
I’m not sure what an ACSM file is, think you could give me a TLDR?
My understanding is it is a file linked to your account that links to the epub file. It lets you and only you download your copy of the epub file you purchased.
Every single thing I use gets changed, ruined, shut down, canceled, moved, merged. It never ends.
Wound up giving up and using Google podcast BECAUSE other ones I used kept getting shut down.
Way of the world. At least the churn of enshitification means we get some new good stuff for a little while.
Pocket Casts has been reliable for me for years. I don’t even use their pro features, but I pay anyway because it’s so cheap. Highly recommended.
Cheap? Unless someone snagged Pocketcasts when it was still a one off payment app, it is NOT cheap. Heck, I can pay for YouTube Premium, Spotify Premium and still have money left for one more streaming service to plug into before I hit what Pocketcasts wants me to pay. The app is good but it is the very antithesis of cheap.
Wow, that’s odd.
I’m paying 119 SEK/year for the Plus tier, which is the result of a price raise some time ago as well. But I see now that it’s 533 SEK/year all of a sudden for new customers.
Still, that’s not too expensive, honestly. If you need the features, it’s pretty good.
I don’t, so I won’t pay that amount of my account is put on that price point…
Another great app for podcasts I can recommend is Podcast Addict. Free and it’s full of great features.
To clarify, Pocket Casts is also free. 👍 I just recommend supporting them because the pro price is so cheap.
Supported!
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it seems antennapod recently got the play state sync feature using gpoddersync.
I need to check out the lifetime pass price, thanks for reminding me!
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Awh man. Oh well, I’ll keep paying.
Thank you for ideas to look into.
My pleasure!
Anyone have a suggestion for a alternative simple light weight podcast app for android?
Edit: I installed antennapod and it’s exactly what I was looking for. Very light weight and even open source. Thank you for all the suggestions.
Pocket casts. Also, you might be able to export your podcast subscriptions from Google Podcasts in opml format.
Pocket casts, fucking amazing!
Podcast addict
Another +1 for AntenaPod. It’s fantastic.
I’ve been using the BeyondPod app. Simple and has a cast feature.
It’s the only one that I’ve found that has Smart Play. I’m not sure why not all podcast players have this, it’s such a great feature. Going back to something without it, would feel like going back to the stone age.
Antenna pod is great. I switched to it from google podcasts a couple months ago figuring this would happen.
Seconding AntennaPod, it’s been my daily driver for years. Open source, good community, continual improvements.
Thirding! (is that a thing?)
I recently noticed it has the option to import/export your subscriptions, which is useful for backups or if the podcast app you’re migrating from supports the .opml file format too.
Great suggestion. Thank you both!
Podcast Republic. I don’t know if it’s the best, but I’m used to it and it does everything I want and nothing I don’t want. It’s also open source.
Podkicker
I’ve been using BeyondPod for years.
Podcast Addict
This was my favorite but I thought it shut down
No, they got acquired by Automatic (AKA that Wordpress company). They’re still plugging along though.
I recently stopped using this. I prefer paying for things so I know they will be taken care of, but their price increases came without any improvements to the service for a while. If you are okay with paying though, it’s pretty good.
AntennaPod is free and has worked well for me so far as a replacement. It isn’t as intuitive with its discovery feature, but it works well enough.
How long until they shut down Search? It’s been dog shit for years.
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With the announcement of Gemini you have to think Bard’s days are numbered.
Gemini is the underlying technology, they put it in Bard when they announced it.
You mean the fraudulent video of things it can’t do?
Nah.
Gemini can’t do a lot more stuff than Bard can’t do though.
Bard is also a crap name. Bard will be on killedbygoogle.com soon enough.
A Large Language Model AI still needs a search index like OpenAI uses Bing otherwise funky hallucinations are more likely.
