Podcasts on Android

In October last year, Google announced that the Google Play Music app will soon support Podcasts. They posted on their blog and called for podcast creators the world over to sign up to have their podcast listed.

It has taken a long time but as of April 18th the updated Google Play Music App is now available across the USA and Canada.

There are plenty of apps available on the Play Store that let you play podcasts already, including Spotify as of last summer. So why are people excited about the Google Play Music App adding their support?

Unlike iOS devices, Android devices have never had support for Podcasts out of the Box.

If you wanted to listen to Podcasts on an Android device before now you had two options, find yourself a decent third party app (through trial and error, recommendations etc) the good ones usually costing a little bit of money, and then subscribe to your favourites. Or, you could do it the old fashioned way and download the podcasts direct from a website and transfer them to your phone or MP3 player.

It is exciting to be able to save space on your phone, not have to search out or pay for a decent app to play podcasts on. But that aside, Google, King of search and AI, will no doubt have some interesting ways of discovering podcasts up their sleeve.

The new app with the support is not available in the UK at the moment and we don't have details on when it will arrive. However, apart from the Google Play Books app, Play Music is the last app to get the refreshed app icon. Perhaps they will arrive together? If so, we should be getting it any time now.

Only time will tell.

If you just can't wait and are new to podcasts, do not despair. google announced today that you can now listen to podcasts straight from the Google Search app with no need to update it. Simply search for the Podcast you want to listen to, select an episode, and hit play! The controls will appear in your notifications just as they do when you play music.

So go learn something new, spend time in the company of those with similar interests, laugh long to comedy, or whatever else it is you want to do: discover podcasts.

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Until next time…

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