Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service.
For anyone getting this news here. On Android, one of the best replacements is AntennaPod.
Podcast Addict is not quite as streamlined, but has many more features.
My favorite feature is the “Automatic Rewind” combined with “Incremental rewind”. It adds a rewind everytime you pause and resume an episode that increases the longer the podcast has been paused. It means that if I briefly pause, for example to respond to. Some one in real life talking to me, then it will automatically rewind 5 seconds when I start the podcast again, so I can hear the sentence I was in the middle of in full. But if I leave a podcast alone for a week, then it will rewind 1 minute so I can get fully back into the context of what I was listening to.
What you describe is also a feature of AntennaPod.
Edit: AntennaPod is also open source.
Awesome! I actually downloaded Antenna Pod to compare, but I can’t seem to find this setting, could you point it out to me?
I don’t know if it’s actually a setting, I’ve only noticed the behaviour. Neat little feature!
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I have used this for years now. It’s really great. I have it set to skip the first 7 minutes of only certain podcasts because they usually have 7 - 8 minutes of ads. I also have it skip silences, which speeds up listening more than I first thought it would.
Another vote for Podcast Addict. It works with Android Auto in my car :-)
Now to listen to all these shows I have downloaded…
I’ve always been a fan of Pocket Casts personally.
I have a lifetime membership with PocketCasts, but I don’t know if I’d chose it today with the subscription. A few months ago, they shipped a buggy version and I temporarily switched to AntennaPod and was considering staying.
Also a big fan of AntennaPod, I switched to it back when Google first announced they were axing Podcasts and thought I’d have a lot less time to abandon ship than I ended up with.
I’m a big fan of Podcast Republic. Great dev, feature-rich, and a much improved UI from when I first started using it.
Podcast Republic is my choice as well. It’s the only Podcast app that I could find that let’s you choose your download folder. I like to play my podcasts with the same app I listen to books with, so I need to download the podcasts to a publicly accessible folder.
Looking at the data safety info, I think I’ll go with Antenna Pod
Completely fair, it it however worth mentioning that you can disable this data collection in settings.
To be fair perhaps they want to make it possible to download the podcast unencrypted in MP3
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For iOS, Overcast is the only correct answer
I still use the default app. What can be better there?
I have come to rather like Downcast on iOS myself. Should check it out if you never have.
I love Pocket Casts. Sadly I have a hard time recommending it to new people since they switched to subscription model payment. The reason I love it is because of what it was, not what it is. I’m grandfathered into the "pay once, own forever"and if I wasn’t I would probably be using something else these days. I’m still gonna throw it in as a recommendation though, because it’s damn good and people should make up their own minds in whether it is worth the payment.
I don’t mind their subscription model. All the subscription features – cloud storage, folders, desktop app, extra themes – really feel like bonus features that aren’t essential.
I recommend Podcast Republic. Maybe recommend that to people?
I can’t recommend something I do not use.
So use it for a week 😀 😀
I have pocket casts set up the way I want it and, as I previously said, own the full featured product for life without extra costs. I just don’t see a reason to.
That’s fine. I was just saying if you wanted to recommend any other options to your friends who ask you, Podcast Republic on Android is a solid choice to consider. That’s all.
I went to download it, and apparently I already had! Now to start subscribing to everything again…bleh.
Oh, sweet! Thank you. I’ll see if I can figure this out this weekend.
PodcastAddict is better in my opinion
Yeah podcast addict was the shit
Thanks for the recommendation. I was wondering what else to try as I sure as hell don’t want to use YouTube and it doesn’t seem like you can have a separate podcast playlist in Spotify.
I tried AntennaPod but went back because of Android Auto. I just found this showing how to get AntennaPod on AndroidAuto!
Google killing a product? No way
Who did they kill?
Nah they done it before with chat
Your sarcasm detector requires calibration.
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.
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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.
Tip: just don’t use Google products
Ty I was gonna post that link lmao
I was looking for you “OMG GOOGLE IS KILLING EVERYTHING!” people. They don’t have infinite money, stuff costs money to run and if it isn’t as popular as their other services obviously they’d shut it down. People use their products for free (monetarily) for years and then bitch and complain when something gets shut down, never having paid a cent.
People use their products for free (monetarily) for years and then bitch and complain when something gets shut down, never having paid a cent.
Click on the link before commenting, and where did I give a shit about google shutting their stuff down?
I see someone like him and block him instantly, knowing I just made life better.
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.
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.
I will never shut up about pocket casts. Their multi-device sync is wonderful. I can pick up where I left off on any episode from any of their apps. They’ve even got a pretty decent UWP app that I use on my Windows installs. They also have rock solid Chromecast support.
I loved it so much I bought the lifetime pass a long time ago. At any rate, I can’t recommend pocket casts enough!
I need to check out the lifetime pass price, thanks for reminding me!
Unfortunately, I believe they stopped offering it some time ago. :(
Awh man. Oh well, I’ll keep paying.
it seems antennapod recently got the play state sync feature using gpoddersync.
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!
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…
Thank you for ideas to look into.
My pleasure!
Way of the world. At least the churn of enshitification means we get some new good stuff for a little while.
fuck it, do gmail next, force me to find a proper provider
who exactly thinks it’s good that things are this ephemeral? what’s the point of even using and enjoying and getting invested in something when they constantly pull this shit?
Gmail is to valuable a source of advertising data
In other words, Google won’t kill what they can use to harvest your data.
Finding an alternative is the easy part. You can get yourself a domain on Namecheap, and get an email attached to it for pennies.
Issue is that a lot of services out there don’t consider alternative email providers as valid. Some as a protective measure against spam, some because… fuck knows why, honestly
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 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?
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 just gave up and attached a small form factor PC to my TV.
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.
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.
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.
Steam Deck ftw.
It is my everything. Seriously.
Pocketcasts is great and supports Chromecast
Thanks, I know.
10 Google: We’re so rich! Let’s make a product!
20 Google: kills product
30 goto 10
You forgot major adoption and promotion for all parties involved.
Another service that I didn’t know google even offered until they announced it was dying. There are so many sources that podcast apps can pull from that we don’t need half as many as we have.
I actually really enjoy it. It’s my go to no frills podcast app that isn’t paired with music or other extra stuff
I used podcast addict. It does what I need it to do.
podcast addict is fantastic, I tried a lot of different options before settling on it
It does what you need it to do because it does everything. Podcast Addict is one of the most feature rich apps.
I now use pocket cast , it’s similar with its simplistically but still different.
I’ve been using AntennaPod and it is no frills and works flawlessly.
Podcasts are just mp3s (or whatever other audio format like ogg). Authors/pod casters should just host them on their site and be done with it. Why let some other company take a lion share of your ad profit. We need less centralized services and more distributed services. Use lemmy or mastodon to promote them. :)
Another one in the Google graveyard.
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Lmao. I’m shocked.
Never rely on Google apps.
The end.
What’s a good alternative to Google maps? I’m getting sick of it.
I use it, I like it and it works with zero issues. It also easily works with my Google Home speaker. So of course it gets shut down. Because obviously. Sigh.
That said, Pocket Casts on iOS is also quite decent.
Same I pivoted to PocketCasts
Odd, I use the same on mobile and max hub and find they only sync on way. If I listen to one on the hub I have to manually remember where I left off.
Pocket Casts has both an Android and iOS version. If you pay for their “subscription” their web app also works, though I’ve never used it I’ve heard good things.
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.
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 Addict
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.
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.
Pocket casts, fucking amazing!
I’ve been using the BeyondPod app. Simple and has a cast feature.
Another +1 for AntenaPod. It’s fantastic.
Podcast addict
I’ve been using BeyondPod for years.
Podkicker
They didn’t market this very well. Literally the first time I’m hearing about this
Name literally one thing that Google markets well.
Well, we use the word Google to mean using a search engine now, so that one was done pretty well. Otherwise I’m not sure.
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…
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.
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?
