Google Podcasts launched in 2018 and has now shut down in the US as YouTube Music becomes the company’s main podcasting solution.
YouTube Music officially launched support for podcasts in the US a year ago. It spent most of 2023 adding features and expanding international availability, though it’s still missing basic functionality compared to other clients.
In September, the company previewed that Google Podcasts was shutting down. That said, the writing has been on the wall since late 2021. It went without any major new features in 2022.
Top comment by berto1014
Color me surprised, the replacement (YTM) doesn't have feature parity with the original (Podcasts) or even basic like mark as played by the time the original dies. Google's signature move.
I know most people won't, but I strongly encourage people to look into 3rd party replacements for Google apps. As I mentioned in other articles, I've been thoroughly enjoying Plexamp over YTM. We need to give our 3rd party devs some love again, they are the only ones looking out for us and offering fully featured apps.
Back in December, Google provided an “after April 2” date for the US deprecation. As of the morning of April 4, a “Google Podcasts is no longer available’ splash screen appears on Android and iOS. That same message appears on podcasts.google.com, but the website still works for now.
Other regions will follow soon after but specifics haven’t been shared yet. Google Podcasts introduced an Export subscriptions feature to migrate to YouTube Music or download an OPML file that transfers your subscriptions to another app. You have until July 30, 2024 to use it.
As of today’s shutdown, YouTube Music has unfortunately not rolled out the “mark as played” functionality it mentioned was previously coming. YTM is also still missing other basic podcasting features, like new episode notifications.
YouTube Music will never be as simple as Google Podcasts. People loved the straightforward nature of the UI. The fact it was powered by the Google app made it available on every Android device. As of today, the app icon/shortcut has over 500 million downloads on the Play Store.
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