I recently was on the hunt for alternatives to Pocket Casts for my podcast consumption. While Pocket Casts has proven to be an excellent service and I’ve pretty happy with their offering, things didn’t go all that well when I started consuming podcasts through my laptop (earlier, I use to consume them only through mobile).
The primary concern I faced was, Pocket Casts’ Web player is available only for Pocket Casts Plus subscribers. This also meant that I would have to manually sync my listening progress whenever I switched devices while in the middle of a podcast.
I decided to give Google Podcasts a try - I have glanced through it in the past, but never used it as a daily driver. After I started using it, one of the things I noticed was the feature to synchronize listening progress across devices. It didn’t make sense that Google would skip on something as basic as that - I was scanning through settings to see if it is potentially turned OFF, but didn’t see anything related to it.
After little bit of Googling Bing-ing, I realized that cross-device sync is supported only if you have “Web & App Activity” turned ON on your Google Profile.
Once I got it going, have been having pretty good experience with Google Podcasts, and don’t see myself moving over to another app or service any time soon!