Rule of Google: if it works, kill it.

I know, I know, using Google apps isn’t the best, but this was a perfectly good Podcast app with all the features you might want.

Apparently they’re moving everything over to YouTube Music, where a lot of the features of Google Podcasts aren’t implemented yet.

I’ve moved over to an app from F-Droid.

  • A_Porcupine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    This is weird marketing, why not just say “we’re merging Google podcast and YouTube music into one app”?

    • Mjpasta710@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      They’re not trying to force everyone to use the alternative product with this message. I think you can export the podcast subscriptions to a number of clients.

    • tourist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker

      Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.

      • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Tombstone 2030-2032 Google Pacemaker

        Killed 8 years from now, Google Pacemaker was an IoT pacemaker for patients with heart arrhythmia. All devices were remotely deactivated after 2 years.

        🤯 😂

    • candybrie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Pixel Pass

      Killed 8 months ago, Pixel Pass was a program that allowed users to pay a monthly charge for their Pixel phone and upgrade immediately after two years. It was almost 2 years old.

      Well, that seems particularly scummy.

  • youngalfred@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I don’t really understand how they consistently manage to screw things up. And they always say that the features are coming, but they never do.

    I’m still bitter over Inbox.

    I used to be excited about new things from Google. Tried to get into every beta, downloaded the newest released apps etc. But not anymore.

    I just read about tasks being removed from Google Keep. Then the feature removal from nest hubs. Do they have a unified strategy at all? Or is it just the whims of a manager’s daily musings that drive what development does?

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Man, Inbox was so good. I still start typing “inbox” into the address bar to get to my emails.

    • nialv7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There’s barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’ve heard a theory that says all the apps and services they make only have the purpose of collecting data. Sort of like limited time experiments. Once they get all they need from one of them they kill it and move on.

      Sometimes they pretend to roll a dead service into another product in order to drive customers to that product but it’s done only in name, by a completely unrelated team and with only a vaguely related feature subset.

      It would certainly explain a lot.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It’s a company culture thing. You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products. You are rewarded for starting new ones.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.

        However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.

        Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.

        You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.

      • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        You’re not rewarded for maintaining or finishing products.

        No kidding.

        It is 2024, and here is your yearly reminder that you still can’t create a new folder/label in the official Gmail Android app despite the online documentation implying that you can.

        • foggenbooty@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Android users literally run their lives out of Google Calendar. Think you can share your calendar with a friend from your phone? Think again. It’s back to the 10 year old desktop interface for you!

          Oh you’re not at home at your computer, well, try using the desktop version of Google Calandar on your phone’s browser. I dare you.

          • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            I’m still waiting for the day when we can create an event from a message in Gmail.

          • Interstellar_1@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            It’s unbelievable that so much of the gsuite on mobile web doesn’t seem to have been even touched in nearly a decade. It’s insane to me that they’re just ignoring that part of their own website even as it’s easily accessible.

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          On the mail side:

          Reporting phishing isn’t something an iOS user would ever do. Desktop please!

          Filters? What’re those? To the desktop, come on!

    • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
      0·
      2 months ago

      Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.

      This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

      In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

      Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      They have an agenda, which isn’t aligned with your agenda. They only care about profitability, so they kill any projects not supporting that goal. Some projects are created to gather specific data sets about users, and the project is shut down when the data is captured, regardless of how popular the project was. They are always doing something with an ulterior motive. Once you understand that then you won’t be mystified by their decisions anymore.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        They only care about profitability

        It’s not even profitability. It’s about what looks good on a resume.

        New projects look good. Maintaining old projects doesn’t.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Good thing I never started using it! Fuck you Google, Reader, Inbox and Music taught me never to get into your shit again.

  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    i think its a bit more simple than that

    If a product is really good experience for you (ie. Not crammed with ads) AND you dont pay anything for it, then it’s not profitable.

    Google didnt become one of the biggest companies in the world by doing volunteer work for your benefit

    They only exist to show ads and/or harvest your data. Once those goals are met, then the user doesnt matter. They NEVER mattered

    • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I don’t think Google Podcasts required that much maintenance. However it didn’t have the ads that YouTube Music does.

      AntennaPod has been a perfect, free replacement.

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      That’s my go to, FOSS app that rivals the major apps.

      There are other podcast apps on F-Droid also.

    • WamGams@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Antennapod is fine, although it is annoying that there appears to be no way to make it so that it automatically plays the next episode of the podcast you are listening to rather than what you purposefully place into the que.

  • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Googles antics with its service killing is what lead me to trying out the Apple walled garden.

    Now I just need to quit Gmail somehow, sometime.

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    So I’ve been using it on YouTube music and now podcasts suck just as much as when it Google Music merged.

    Now when i just want to listen to my single daily morning podcast, I have to remember to turn the damn thing off because it constantly wants to autoplay random podcasts I have no desire to listen to in the first place. Just ends up throwing my mood off for the day sometimes when it plays some crap that annoys me.

    • Toldry@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Tombstone 2025-2027 Google Euthanasia

      Will be killed 3 years from now, Google Euthanasia will have been a service to order remote drone assassins for instant palliative relief. Closed due to privacy laws in the EU.

  • niisyth@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    How else are they gonna half ass implement that into youtube and make that shit bloated af.

    It has long form content, Tiktok clone, Main music delivery system, Twitch clone, And now, Podcasts.

    👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It seems like their trying to roll everything into the over media app and subscription

      Kind of makes sense, all their other apps are pretty fragmented and crappy.

    • xyguy@startrek.websiteEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I don’t have YouTube Pro or whatever its called now and when I listen to music on my Google home it plays an ad after ever song. Since I have switched to Pihole and blocked googles DNS servers the only ads I get are to buy premium YouTube which I assume are hardcoded into something somewhere.

      We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.

        I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google’s euthanasia project:

        • YouTube
        • Google Search
        • Chrome
        • “core” Android system + Play Store (it counts as one)
        • AdSense

        The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can’t fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).

        Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Good catch on GMail - it’s at the same time a vector to invade your privacy and an additional barrier for people leaving the Google ecosystem battery farm.

            I’m not sure on GSuite.

            • dubyakay@lemmy.caEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              GSuite is well used in corporate settings as a cheaper alternative to O365 enterprise.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech

          They’ve primarily been an ad company ever since they acquired DoubleClick in 2008.

    • Trae@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It also has games now.

      I don’t think it’s rolled out to a lot of people. No one at work can see them except me, but my Google app has games that I can bring up.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Going to be called YouTube Podcasts. Soon to be spun off into Google Wallet + Podcasts, then to be renamed Podcasts Pay, then Pay Podcasts, then Google Chrome with Podcasts.