Google Podcasts is shutting down, and that's great news

Google has shut down the Google Podcasts app. He has two lessons to learn from this. That means never trusting any Google product other than Search, Gmail, and YouTube. And people are really, really confused about what a podcast actually is.

Google Podcasts was an Android app for subscribing to and listening to podcasts. Google announced its demise last year, and now it's over. Instead, Google added the podcast within his YouTube Music. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following Google for more than five minutes that the advertising giant has shut down another popular service, but does it really matter? It seems to be the only independent form of media that technology cannot take over and destroy.

“YouTube is a great secondary platform for podcasts, but it's not a podcast platform,” podcaster and technology blogger Graham Bower told Lifewire in a direct message.

podcast confusion

First, what exactly is a podcast? The technical definition is very narrow and simple. A podcast is an audio or video file distributed via an RSS feed. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) means you can subscribe to the show in your podcast app of choice, and new episodes will be automatically downloaded as soon as they're available.

However, the word “podcast” has come to mean episodic audio and video on the Internet. People use this term to describe the video shows they like to watch on YouTube. Additionally, some websites use this term for videos that can be streamed from the site but cannot be subscribed to or downloaded in a podcast app.

Alongside this, more and more people are getting their “podcasts” via YouTube, whether they're videos or just audio. This is a great thing for Google, as we'll see later, and is probably the main reason why Google discontinued its dedicated podcast app.

For users, the removal of Google Podcasts isn't that big of a deal. There are many other podcast apps out there. To be honest, it probably would have been better if it ended before more damage was done.

real simple

To see why, consider another Google pump-and-dump scheme: Google Reader. This beloved service allows users to subscribe to (or in today's parlance, “follow”) almost any blog or regularly updated website on the Internet. It was one of many RSS readers, but instead of distributing podcasts using RSS, it distributed new blog posts.

There were, and still are, many other RSS reader apps and services, but Google Reader had become synonymous with blog subscriptions, and Google's discontinuation of Reader ended RSS's mass popularity. It was like I was lost. Many users probably thought they could no longer follow these blogs.

Why did Google do this? I suspect it was for the same reason they discontinued their podcast app. RSS in the form of blogs or podcasts cannot be tracked. The podcast publisher knows that the app downloaded the episode, but that's it. You might be able to get location information via IP address, but that's difficult on mobile and hardly the kind of data collection Google has built its business on.

“Using ActivityPub” [the protocol used by Threads and Mastodon] You can see who is following you, but not with RSS. This may sound negative unless you think about it from a user's perspective: no spam, no spyware, etc. “This is probably why Google didn't like RSS, by the way,” writes RSS inventor Dave Winer about his Mastodon.

When you watch or listen to podcasts on YouTube, Google can not only track everything you do, but also serve ads to those podcasts.

Fortunately, there are many alternatives. One is to import your podcast list to YouTube. Another is to export your subscription list as a standard file (a format called OPML) and load it into other podcast apps, from Apple's His Podcast to third-party apps like Overcast.

The world of podcasts is healthy enough that Google abandoning the app won't kill it the way the discontinuation of Google Reader killed off RSS reading for blogs. Consider other options besides YouTube. There are plenty of great podcast apps for both Android and iPhone. An app that lets you control your podcasts, download them automatically, and prevent Google or anyone else from tracking your activity.

And the good news doesn't end there. The blog is back, baby! So why not consider some RSS feed readers?