We love us some podcasts at Ausdroid, and while most of us use and love Pocket Casts, Google’s own Podcasts service is improving by leaps and bounds. Their latest round of updates sees a significant improvement to the Google Podcasts web interface.
The guys over at 9 to 5 Google have noticed a few changes that make a big difference to its usability from its earlier implementation.
The first tweak is to a podcast’s primary listing. There is a prominent “Visit website” pill at the very top, while that Material Theme UI element is again leveraged for the “Available episodes” list that takes up the rest of this page.
The other big change is the playback control within the web interface. Now, rather than the play button being docked hard right and being annoyingly small you get a much bigger, easier-to-hit blue play button first up under the episode title.
We’re also seeing the Material Design element of the Navigation Drawer expanding to provide significantly higher detail around current playback and other episodes.
It’s a nice change, but we’re still wondering when will the Android app become fully Material-compliant – and when will it be ready for Dark Mode?
