Google has given its official app for Podcasts a major design refresh, with a lot of tweaks that address usability complaints that users have made to the Mountain View, California-based giant. This comes after Google earlier this year, redesigned the Now Playing UI in Google Podcasts.
The changes start on the “Home” tab, where the podcasts carousel is now called “Subscriptions.” This allowed Google to add another “More” button that opens a grid view, addressing constant complaints of those users that follow a lot of shows.
Users had been complaining about the earlier carousel-like layout that required a lot of scrolling to find a particular podcast. The Home tab is unchanged except for each episode card adding an overflow menu in the bottom right corner. This allows users to quickly “Share” podcasts or “Mark as played.” This will save users from having to open the full episode page in order to mark a podcast as played.
“Explore” tab remains unchanged except for a new Google Podcasts watermark. This replaces the red “Beta” tag for all users. Lastly, the ‘Activity’ tab has now been changed to “Library.” The four tabs within ‘Activity’ – Your Queue, Downloads, History, and Subscriptions have been removed.
Apart from the visual changes, another welcome change is that tapping the Google Podcasts app/home screen icon no longer resets where users are in the app and take them to the “Home” tab. This used to happen because Google Podcasts was a part of an extension of the Google app. Now, Google Podcasts acts like a separately installed app on your smartphone.
The update started rolling out to beta users on Friday. There’s a new 12.30 variant update in the Play Store, but force stopping the main Google app from “App info” will also trigger the revamp.
