Google Podcasts is supposed to remain (for the time being) and not be merged with YouTube Music, but the desktop website is partially broken at the moment.
Update: The issue has now been resolved.
Opening podcasts.google.com today reveals a navigation drawer that has overlapped with the main column of content. Besides being visually jarring and preventing you from easily reading the feed of recommendations (tap the hamburger button), links to various Google Podcasts sections — Explore, Subscriptions, Queue, and Settings — are broken and no longer clickable. They remain inaccessible when you adjust the width of the page.
Fortunately, direct links still work:
- podcasts.google.com/subscriptions
- podcasts.google.com/queue
- podcasts.google.com/subscribe-by-rss-feed
- podcasts.google.com/settings
Other functionality like searching and starting podcasts is unaffected. There are no issues with the mobile apps on Android or iOS.
Google Podcasts has not seen any major additions in the past several years. The last update was Material You tweaks and Dynamic Color on Android in September of 2021. In fact, episode results are no longer surfaced in Google Search.
When podcasts in YouTube Music was announced in February, Google told us that the new YouTube podcasting effort is different from Google Podcasts, with “no plans to merge the two apps.”
A more critical read of that would be how Google Podcasts will remain until podcasts in YouTube Music are feature complete (RSS) and available worldwide (currently US-only). However, I definitely believe that there’s room for the two apps to co-exist. Some people don’t want music and podcasts to appear side-by-side, while the simplicity of Google Podcasts makes it one of the company’s better apps. It would be nice if it got an influx of new features after initial development on YouTube is complete.
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