I like listening to podcasts when I’m doing household chores. So I recently opened YouTube Music with the intention of continuing a podcast I’d been enjoying the evening before, but instead of resuming where I left off, I found myself squinting at the screen, scrolling through a wall of music suggestions, videos, and algorithmic clutter. The podcast was nowhere in sight. YouTube Music had let me down, again.
My dream is to have as few apps as possible, and that’s why I genuinely enjoy Spotify’s take on merging podcasts with music. But a good podcast app should let me resume where I left off without making me hunt for the podcast. Spotify manages to do this, mostly. YouTube Music should be able to, after all, it’s backed by Google’s formidable infrastructure and teams of some of the brightest minds in the industry. It already handles music playlists like a dream. But podcasts? They’re still a mess.