Personally, I love the Google Podcast because it’s accessible and free. The search giant is now rolling out a major design change and tweaks to address usability complaints as far as the application is concerned.
On the Home tab, there is a new carousel which is named “subscriptions” and there is also a “more” button which when clicked opens up an entire interface of all your subscription in a grid view. Although I’d still prefer Google making this interface switchable whereby a user can go from grid view to list view.
Meanwhile, the “Home” feed is unchanged except for each episode card adding an overflow menu in the bottom-right corner. This lets you quickly “Share” or “Mark as played.” This saves users from having to first open the full episode page in order to complete the latter action.
“Explore” is unchanged save for the “Google Podcasts” wordmark — which drops the red “Beta” tag for all users — appearing in the app bar, thus avoiding the double “Explore” with the bottom bar.
There is also a change of name or maybe feature. Google renamed the “Activity” to “Library” making it a triple-tab system rather than the four we are used to in the recent past.
The roll-out of the Podcasts app update started on Friday evening for Google app beta users and there’s a new 12.30 variant update in the Play Store even though the app is still buggy and often crashes when used.