The latest design overhaul for Google Podcasts sees the introduction of a new “Subscriptions” panel on the Home tab. It houses all your subscribed playlists, with a “More” button letting you see them all in a grid view. Earlier, there was no such button. While your subscribed playlists still appeared up top, it was a never-ending carousel of album artwork. If you are subscribed to a lot of shows, you would require to scroll endlessly to find a particular podcast. The ability to see all your subscribed playlists on the same screen now makes things a lot simpler. There’s also now an overflow menu for each show. You can tap on it to mark a podcast as played. You can also share a podcast from that menu. This saves time and effort as users don’t require to open the podcast for these actions. The Explore tab is largely unchanged as far as functionality and interface are concerned. But there are some major changes in the Activity tab. Google has renamed it Library and has dropped the tabbed view in favor of a list. The Subscriptions section is now up top, with Queue, Downloads, and History following. The earlier tabbed interface wasn’t necessarily inconvenient as you could easily swipe through, but this change makes for one lesser tap Last but not least, the Google Podcasts app/homescreen icon now behaves like any other app. Tapping it doesn’t reset where you were in the app but simply re-opens it where you’d left off. Earlier, tapping the icon would take you to the Home tab no matter where you were the last time.
The latest Google Podcasts redesign is now rolling out widely
Google is now widely rolling out the latest redesign for the Google Podcasts app for Android. As mentioned earlier, version 12.32 or higher of the app brings these changes but likely via a server-side update to the main Google app. You can click on the link below to check for an update for the app on the Google Play Store. If there’s no update available, check back again later. If you don’t see the changes even after installing the latest version, you can try force-stopping the Google app from “App info.” DOWNLOAD GOOGLE PODCASTS
