One of the best apps on any platform

Grabbed AntennaPod from the Play Store. It’s been a perfect replacement.

One of my favorite podcast app.

I’m kind of into Podscast Addict. Not sure how it compares, but its pretty good.

There’s still no better email client than inbox. It was so fucking good

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

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.

I’m not ready to be reminded of the loss of inbox

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+)

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

I’m still pissed over the loss of inbox.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google music, Google+, Google Spaces, they even killed Google Cache recently - which was a fantastic way to get around my work’s brain-dead decision to block the company (including IT) from reaching Reddit.

Switched to Antennapod when abandoning Spotify recently. It’s been great! Way better interface than Spotify’s embarrassingly horrible UI.

Fine. I finally installed f-droid, because while I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, I am trying to listen to more, and YT Music is ass for finding new podcasts.

Please give me recommendations for more podcasts that may like based on what I got

Been on it for a few years now. It’s great.

The only other one I’d really recommend is Podcast Addict. I only switched to Antennapod because it has a little less busy UI.

Love it!

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

There are other podcast apps on F-Droid also.

I use it for audiobooks already, does it do podcasts well? As in, do I need to download the podcasts somehow and put it in like an audiobook?

You self hosters are worse than crossfitters and mountaineers, always stretching to find ways to slip it into conversations. Quit making me feel feelings about how I’m not hosting my own cloud services and just using whatever Google shit exists.