Many paid/non-FOSS apps provide more features then AntennaPod, or have better layouts, but AntennaPod is one of the FOSS apps that is close enough to being what I really want, that I use it over the rest.
The one feature missing that I’m really baffled by is the ability to customize how your podcasts page is laid out, so hopefully they get around to it one of these days.
While I don’t nessesarily hate YT Music (merging Spotify habits with it means I have community uploads and official streams in the same place) this is such a Google move to pull off.
Best case scenario: They forget about whatever product you like and it’s allowed to continue running for years with zero updates.
Most likely scenario: They kill it off to merge into another product line that overlaps with a third of the features only to do the exact same thing again within a year or two.
Just use a good podcast app like Pocket Casts. It’s the king on iOS at least, so I assume it’s good on Android as well. I never understood why people keep using these shitty Google apps that always get abandoned.
AntennaPod on Android. I use Pocket Casts but only because I’m on iOS, once I switch back to Android I’m going back to AntennaPod, it’s open source and imo easier to customise than any other podcast app and I went through a lot of them trying to find the one that doesn’t try to force it’s terrible ux on you
All podcast apps are broken, be it Pocket Casts, AntennaPod or the officials one from Apple/Google. I always discover on the go that an episode has been partially downloaded and even though I authorized the download over my data network, it doesn’t resume automatically.
I originally switched from Podcast Addict to Google Podcasts for seamless integration when listening to podcasts directly on Google Home devices. Hopefully this means better Google Home integration with popular third-party podcast apps, but it probably just means we’ll be forced to use YouTube Music instead. :-/
Mind you I love pocket casts but I always have had the need to install another podcast app such as Google podcasts, castbox or fountain to have a search that works beyond the show name at the level of episode names.
Sometimes I love listening to various podcasts about a topic or I’m just curious and use it like an user uses youtube search.
Pocket Casts isn’t on Android. I kept hearing it brought up when I was looking to replace DoggCatcher and went with Podcast Addict. Took Google so long to finally allow people to manually add feeds from URL. Which was why I never really used it unless just wanting to stream an old ep of a listed show randomly. So when they added that ability, I was happy to see they seemed to be kind of supporting it seriously. But I was already moved to PA and am glad to not gone with Google.
I liked their original Listen app for being ridiculously bare bones and no ads or anything that requires more data. But they killed that long ago. I am not sure if Google just loves to create trust issues with users. Or if they just really have self esteem issues and can only act in dramatic ways that don’t make sense.
Google employee 1: We made podcasts in Play Music better and adoption went up again.
Google manager: Oh, that’s neat. I’ll make a bullet point on this week’s team meeting.
Google employee 2: We spent many millions on a new podcast app and servers, engineering, data migration, PR, integrations and adoption is lower. Actually, nobody wanted it or cares or likes it.
Google VP: Everyone this can’t fail. Pick the best looking metrics, prepare a series of announcements and get ready for a wave of promotions and it’s all thanks to this superstar manager who’s definitely getting a huge bonus and double promotion so I can spin this like it was a win. The best part? Get ready for a repeat when we replace this again in 2 to 3 years.
Why is Google trying to follow the model of Spotify even though the model is not really successful? I hate when browsing my music in Spotify some podcast pops up. I just want to listen to my music, dammit!
Also the fact that the ongoing notification always disappears. YouTube and all other media playing stay there forever. A minute after I’m done playing music, it’s like YTM was never there.
I mean GPM was buggy too, but it was just unstable and slow. YTM just has boneheaded bugs. I’ve started running wearing a WearOS watch and it can’t even list more than 100 albums in my library, so I can’t download any albums alphabetically after Love Songs Drug Songs by the X Ambassadors.
I had a fun bug for awhile on GPM were playing my library on shuffle it would mostly play songs that started with P. A 30 minute car ride would have 3 songs that started with P and the other 5-6 would be more random.
I have 4 people that use it on my account, it plays music just fine. Makes playlists, finds similar artist, View artist/album on long press, add to current list now or at the end, etc…
Actually has some interesting and unique features (like I can add stuff from youtube app or desktop even to a playlist and it will be in the playlist on TYM later on.)
If I am on a 20 minutes drive I need the damn thing to keep playing music for 20 minutes, not just randomly stop playing halfway through a song. YTM does that. Spotify doesn’t. Nor does my other background players.
For starters, it won’t stop raping my data with video plays and downloads, even though I tell it not to do anything without wifi.
It also seems to ‘shuffle’ the same newest 40 songs or so, out of my 1000s of liked songs. Could never understand why, I just want random not algorithm random.
Well fuck me, why? Why oh why? It’s such a clean and simple app, no weird shit and of course it gets axed. I think I may just stop listening to podcasts then, much easier than switching to an app I have no interest in.
I was having some problems with Google podcasts (which I used for years) and switched to Pocket Casts. It’s been great other than some kind of clunky bits when trying to add to/edit your play-next queue, but otherwise I think it’s a pretty great transition from Google
This is why Google will forever be behind Apple. Any app that can’t be monetised gets killed. Why give Android users a stable ecosystem after all? Fuck the users. Google fucking sucks.
It’s more the principal that Google doesn’t care about their ecosystem or users. There would be uproar if Apple killed their podcasts app, since it has been around for so long. But Android users are just used to this shit now.
It’s not like podcast players are particularly complex to build and maintain, so they don’t require that much cashflow. Podbean sustains itself quite well with the odd image ad and AntennaPod is FOSS. I think the problem is more the opposite, since competition is so easy and monetising it would suck interest out of it, Google has no interest in actually competing. Which is why they’re trying to build their own walled garden with uploading your podcasts only directly to YouTube, RSS feeds be damned.
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