Google Podcasts has been sitting on Google’s death row for a few months now since the September announcement. Now, a new support article details Google’s plans to kill the product, with a shutdown coming in April 2024.
Google Podcasts (2016–2024) is Google’s third attempt at a podcasting app after the Google Reader-powered Google Listen (2009–2012) and Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020). The product is being shut down in favor of podcast app No. 4, YouTube Podcasts, which launched in 2022.
Google support article details how you can take your subscriptions with you. If you want to move from Google Podcasts to YouTube Podcasts, Google makes that pretty easy with a one-click button at music.youtube.com/transfer_podcasts. If you want to leave the Google ecosystem for something with less of a chance of being shut down in three to four years, you can also export your Google Podcast subscriptions as an OPML file at podcasts.google.com/settings. Google says exports will be available until August 2024.
With the shutdown of Google Podcasts coming, we might assume YouTube Podcasts is ready, but it’s still a pretty hard service to use. I think all the core podcast features exist somewhere, but they are buried in several menus. For instance, you can go to youtube.com/podcasts, where you will see a landing page of “podcast episodes,” but there’s no clear way to add podcasts to a podcast feed, which is the core feature of a podcast app. YouTube still only prioritizes the regular YouTube subscription buttons, meaning you’ll be polluting your video-first YouTube subscription feed with audio-first podcast content.
I thought the original justification for “YouTube Podcasts” is that a lot of people put podcast-style content on YouTube already, in the form of news or talk shows, so adding some podcast-style interfaces to YouTube would make that easier to consume. I don’t think that ever happened to YouTube, though. There are more podcast-centric features sequestered away in YouTube Music, where a button with the very confusing label “Save to library” will subscribe to a podcast feed. The problem is the world’s second most popular website site is YouTube, not YouTube Music. Music is a different interface, site, and app, so none of these billions of YouTube viewers are seeing these podcast features. Even if you try to engage with YouTube Music’s podcast features, it will still pollute your YouTube playlists and library with podcast content. It’s all very difficult to use, even for someone seeking this stuff out and trying to understand it.
But this is the future of Google’s podcast content, so the company is plowing ahead with it. You’ve got just a few months left to use Google Podcasts. If you’re looking to get off Google’s wild ride and want something straightforward that works across platforms, I recommend Pocket Casts.
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