Contact Google Podcasts Support

We got a bunch of google nest mini’s for the holidays so I started looking for apps that I could cast my podcasts through. Naturally I figured google would have the best app for this. While it’s the best app for casting podcasts to their speakers, the actual interface is infuriating. Organizing new pods is so confusing, things don’t download, and the worst feature of all: when pressing fast-forward on a Bluetooth speaker instead of advancing the podcast 30 seconds like literally every other app, it’s skips to the next podcast and marks the podcast as finished. Add in that it just randomly starts playing and when casting it forgets your progress. With podcasts as huge as they are right now I’m dumbfounded that google’s official app for them could be THIS bad. Scrap it and start from scratch.

In the user interface this app very well designed. I find that it is easier and more intuitive than Apple Podcasts which used to be the easiest to use, but after several bad choices in interface change, Apple Podcasts is just a confusing mess that I never got used to. The reason I am giving Google Podcast a one star is because Google decided to remove the ability to add your custom RSS feed. I subscribe to some paid shows that are not available for free and require a personalized RSS feed URL, and Google decided to remove this essential feature that effectively renders this app completely useless for me. If Google brings back the ability to add custom RSS URLs, I would be happy to revise my rating.

This was my go-to podcasting app until about a week ago, when my feed was suddenly filled with two daily podcasts to which I’d never subscribed. Every attempt to unsubscribe, both here and on the web, is unsuccessful. I can unsubscribe from every other podcast without any problems. I’ve tried everything, and there’s nothing in the help documentation or forums except hundreds of other people complaining about the same problem. I’d be able to ignore this, except none of my other podcasts are daily, which means that to find the ones to which I’ve actually subscribed, I have to look through a feed that is literally 80% spam. The unavoidable podcasts are both news podcasts (Slate and CNN), so I doubt it’s some kind of secret sponsorship thing. It seems like some major bug in Google Podcast’s handling of feeds. Either way, it makes this app suddenly unusable, which is unfortunate.