RIP Google Podcasts. Google’s self-branded podcasting service shuts down tomorrow, April 2, and current customers have till July to export any subscriptions which are nonetheless on the service. Google initially introduced the shutdown in September and has been plastering shutdown notices everywhere in the Google Podcasts web site and app for a number of days now.
Google Podcasts was Google’s third podcasting service, after Google Pay attention (2009–2012) and Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020). The shutdown will clear the deck for Google’s media consolidation beneath the YouTube model with podcasting app No. 4: YouTube Podcasts.
Google Podcasts has at all times had a clumsy life. Regardless of an eight-year existence, it has solely been a viable podcasting app for possibly half that point. The undertaking grew out of the Google Search group’s need to index podcast content material. That began in 2016 when looking for a podcast would present a participant embedded proper within the Google Search outcomes. This solely labored on google.com and on the Android search app.
The Google Podcasts shutdown discover.
Really subscribing to a podcast did not come till two years later, in 2018, permitting customers to lastly do the naked minimal of opening the app and seeing the newest episodes of reveals they’re subscribed to. Once more, although, this was all within the Google Search app, which did not make sense to anybody, particularly when Google already had an honest podcast ecosystem entering into its main music app, Google Play Music. A month later it launched a formal “Google Podcasts” app on the Play Retailer, serving to the app make a bit extra sense, though beneath the hood the “app” was only a hyperlink to the podcast interface within the Google Search app. This was additionally the primary podcast participant to combine with one other Google Search undertaking, the Google House good speaker.
Two years later, in 2020, Google lastly launched an iOS app. At this level, 4 years after launch, as a third-party observer, you would start to assume that “possibly Google is definitely severe about Google Podcasts.” The very subsequent 12 months rumors of “YouTube Podcasts” began, and the writing was on the wall for the search group’s bizarre little podcast app.
Google Podcasts is likely one of the main examples of Google’s disorganization. Together with Google Play Music Podcasts, Google launched two competing and disconnected podcast providers inside the identical week! The Google Search group by no means had a transparent motive for constructing a podcast app, and no clear imaginative and prescient; it felt prefer it was going rogue inside the corporate. Together with a glacially sluggish growth tempo, Google Podcasts feels prefer it ought to have by no means existed to start with.
