So, What Happened to Google Podcasts? It's Gone.

Google Podcasts launched in 2018 as Google's answer to Apple Podcasts: a free, ad-supported player tied to a Google account, with subscriptions synced through Google's own servers rather than through a manually exported file the way most independent podcast apps handle it. It picked up a real user base over the following years, particularly on Android, where it shipped as a default preinstalled option on many devices, but it never became Google's primary audio product the way Apple Podcasts did for Apple.

In 2023, Google announced it would wind the app down and consolidate podcast listening into YouTube Music instead, framing the move as bringing podcasts and music into one place rather than maintaining two separate audio apps side by side. The Google Podcasts app itself was discontinued in 2024, first for users in the US and then more broadly across other regions, with a built-in migration flow offered inside the app to move subscriptions into YouTube Music before each region's cutoff date arrived.

The practical catch for anyone who didn't migrate in time, or who simply doesn't want to use YouTube Music as a podcast player, is that Google Podcasts subscriptions don't survive on their own once the app is gone -- there's no independent access to that subscription list without an export made beforehand. The safest path, whether back then or for anyone still holding an old backup file today, is exporting an OPML file of subscriptions before an old app disappears entirely, since OPML is the one format nearly every podcast app can both produce and read reliably.

That's also the fastest way onto The Podcast App: export OPML from wherever the subscriptions still live, or pull one from an old Google Takeout archive if one was made at the time, then import it during setup on iOS or Android. Subscriptions and feed URLs carry over cleanly; playback history and per-episode progress do not, since those details lived inside the old app's own database rather than in the portable OPML file itself. From there, cross-platform sync in The Podcast App keeps iOS and Android in step going forward, so the migration only has to happen once.