This week’s dead Google products: Google Podcasts, basic Gmail, and more!
A thrilling roundup of the things Google has killed this week.
This article is missing Jamboard, mainly bc no one knew it existed.
This is an actual email I got today.
My last job was all on the Google ecosystem. They bought like 10 of these things and to be honest, they were a blast during Meetings, but that was pre-covid. Pandemic really effed the office and pushed everyone remote, and I think they were lying around gathering dust when I left.
it's also a big FU to everyone accessing Gmail's web interface over geostationary satellite internet connections. i had to deal with that shit for a few months and HTML mode was the only way to ease the pain from how bad the latency can get. the "normal" view would hang like a mofo all the time.
Agreed. I've reverted to HTML mode recently when tethering from my phone. The signal is bad enough sometimes that it makes a world of difference. Gmail was virtually unusable until I realized HTML mode was still an option.
Really just time to bite the bullet and acknowledge that it is worth the hassle to switch away from a company that I don't like or trust.
The big tragedy there is the loss for the visually impaired. They can switch to a new email provider, but they will have to switch over any necessary emails such as subscription reminders and they will have to be able to download or transfer what might be a decade's worth of archived emails. That will likely be beyond some of them in terms of technical capability and possibly accessibility.
But then Google couldn't give two shits about the disabled.
They wrote up a whole thing about it. It was linked in the article.
They'd be better off using a client like tetramail that is designed for the visually impaired. Afaik Gmail still supports imap
I’ll pour one out for Google Podcasts. I eventually settled on it because it was free, cross-platform, and also kept my podcast life separate from my music library or YouTube views. If you’re a multi-ecosystem home and don’t want your podcast stuff with your music, it really was the best option.
And I definitely won’t be going to YouTube Music with them. I don’t even want my music habits commingling with my YouTube habit and getting recommendations that are just music videos for months.
Google podcast used to be my goto podcast app. I really liked that it was ad-free and you could download to listen during your commute. This offline listening feature didn't work properly on Spotify. I will miss google podcast.
Try AntennaPod, seems to have most of the podcasts I listen to, except 2 that are Spotify exclusives.
As a point of order, AntennaPod doesn't "have" any podcasts; they're all publicly available in a web standard RSS format, so you can get those podcasts on any podcast aggregator/player like Overcast, Podcast Addict, or (my personal favorite) Pocket Casts. In that vein, I recommend choosing your podcast player based on features, not availability.
Thanks for the recommendation, AntennaPod does just what I need.
I tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only 'podcast' I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.
With Google Podcasts, they'd load in with a "Welcome to the Critical Role podcast" intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front... I didn't bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?
I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does... no ads.
Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.
When Google Podcasts launched it was a bad joke, and I was already using Google Play Music for podcasts when they removed the feature. It was basically the same cycle Google is repeating now, and has done to their messaging and music apps.
So I gave Google Podcasts a day to try it, and switched to Podcast Addict.
I will never - NEVER - forgive them for shutting down Google Reader. That’s the closest I’ve come to cutting everything Google out of my life, and I’m still salty about it today.
they removed gmails basic html? i used it yeserday (and evey day before)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google is killing off so many products lately we need to do a roundup or we won't get anything else done today.
YouTube has been slowly consuming all of Google's media properties, and podcasts completes the trinity along with videos (both amateur and scripted Hollywood content) and music.
This was announced on the official YouTube blog, if there was any question about the responsible party.
In 2024, Google Podcasts will die at 8 years old, if you want to count from the weird Google Search beginnings, but only has had the bare minimum feature set of a podcast service for four years.
If you've never heard of this, that's because it got a very small rollout to only Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
You can throw this shutdown into the pile of "Google price increases" this year.
The original article contains 493 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The summary does not make sense because it skipped important parts
As this bot's summaries often do.
