Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service.
Google killing a product? No way
FFS Google’s killing another app I use all the time
At this rate I half expect Google Play books to be dead before 2025
Selfhost Audiobookshelf
Every single thing I use gets changed, ruined, shut down, canceled, moved, merged. It never ends.
Wound up giving up and using Google podcast BECAUSE other ones I used kept getting shut down.
Pocket Casts has been reliable for me for years. I don’t even use their pro features, but I pay anyway because it’s so cheap. Highly recommended.
I will never shut up about pocket casts. Their multi-device sync is wonderful. I can pick up where I left off on any episode from any of their apps. They’ve even got a pretty decent UWP app that I use on my Windows installs. They also have rock solid Chromecast support.
I loved it so much I bought the lifetime pass a long time ago. At any rate, I can’t recommend pocket casts enough!
it seems antennapod recently got the play state sync feature using gpoddersync.
For anyone getting this news here. On Android, one of the best replacements is AntennaPod.
Podcast Addict is not quite as streamlined, but has many more features.
My favorite feature is the “Automatic Rewind” combined with “Incremental rewind”. It adds a rewind everytime you pause and resume an episode that increases the longer the podcast has been paused. It means that if I briefly pause, for example to respond to. Some one in real life talking to me, then it will automatically rewind 5 seconds when I start the podcast again, so I can hear the sentence I was in the middle of in full. But if I leave a podcast alone for a week, then it will rewind 1 minute so I can get fully back into the context of what I was listening to.
I have used this for years now. It’s really great. I have it set to skip the first 7 minutes of only certain podcasts because they usually have 7 - 8 minutes of ads. I also have it skip silences, which speeds up listening more than I first thought it would.
Podcast Addict is exactly the kind of app I wish were in vogue again. Rather than dropping features and hiding options in a race to be “streamlined”, it’s a properly designed piece of software in the classic sense: its a tool first and foremost. It prioritizes usability first, aesthetics second, and gives you all the buttons and levers to make it your own.
Like, it’s the kind of app where if you’re using it and think “eh I don’t like this one thing”, if you look in the settings, there’s probably a way to turn it off. God damn what I wouldn’t give for this to be common place design philosophy again.
Dev is really cool and responsive, too.
This is exactly why I run Linux on all my computers, and run as much open-source software as I can, build my own home server, and set up my own home-automation. It does have a time cost, over convenience, but being able to tailor everything to my needs and wants is a wonderful feeling.
But yes, it would be wonderful if this was a more common mentality in software in general. Especially on mobile devices.
That time cost is spent optimizing, learning, and growing as an engineer. I wasn’t always a full time, highly paid system engineer. It started at home, and I marketed those skills.
Selfhost Audiobookshelf
Ahh, another one for the ol’ Google Graveyard.
