Google Podcasts

» see podcasts.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

google podcasts launched on june 18 2018 as an android app for a category that already had spotify on one side and pocket casts plus the apple bundled podcasts app on the other. google's pitch was that podcasts should be a first-class search result, and that the same listening history should follow you across phone and web. the app itself was deliberately minimal: it played podcasts and remembered where you left off, with a speed slider in the corner and not much else in the ui.

the web player landed in march 2019 and was somehow even more minimal than the android app. it would generate a unique listen.google.com url for any podcast episode you searched, and you could open that url in any browser on any device without an account. for about three years that was the single nicest property of the product. you could send someone a podcast link and they could hear it in a tab without installing anything or signing in.

google announced the shutdown on september 28 2023 with a year of notice. the us version of the app stopped working on april 2 2024. the rest of the world ran until june 24. an export tool let you migrate subscriptions to youtube music or to opml files for any other client. then the listen.google.com urls broke and the search-result integration was rewired to point at youtube music. the standalone product was over.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

i had google podcasts on my android phone the whole time it existed but i never actually settled on it. by 2018 i was already using spotify for music and the few podcasts i listened to had landed there, so the google app was the second-tier option that came preinstalled. the thing that made the app distinct was the web player. when someone in a slack channel sent a podcast link and the link was a listen.google.com url, you could just click it. no signup, no "open in our app" wall. it was the most google-2010 thing google was still shipping in 2022.

~ the kill pattern ~

this is the standard google product death and it follows the inbox-by-gmail script. google ships a focused single-purpose app inside a category dominated by competitors. the team builds a small loyal user base over a few years. then the company announces that the feature is being absorbed into a bigger product it already owns, in this case youtube music, with a year of notice and an export tool. the standalone app stops working on the announced date. the consolidation reason given was that podcasts on youtube music would benefit from video-podcast support, which spotify had also been building.

~ what carried over ~

the surprise was how many people did not migrate. the export tool sent your subscriptions to youtube music or to an opml file. a noisy share of the public-google-podcasts userbase took the opml file and went to pocket casts or antennapod instead, because youtube music was a streaming app with podcasts bolted on rather than a podcast app with music bolted on. for engineers and rss-natives this was the polite-google-deprecation-redirect-protocol working as designed. for the listener, it was one less neutral place to drop a podcast link in chat.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »