Amazon / App / IHEART: RADIO, PODCASTS, MUSIC
REVIEW
iHeartRadio is still the best free way to hear local FM on a Fire tablet.
The 2024 redesign added live-radio lyrics, 15 custom presets, and a tighter discovery feed. The free tier remains generous; the All Access upsell remains awkward.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
iHeart: Radio, Podcasts, Music
IHEARTMEDIA
OUR SCORE
7.4
AMAZON
★ 4.2
PRICE
Free
iHeartRadio’s pitch on Amazon hardware is easier to explain than its pitch on a phone. You sideload it onto a Fire HD tablet in the kitchen, you tap your hometown rock station, and the live FM signal you grew up with comes out the speaker. No login wall, no algorithmic warmup, no four-paragraph onboarding about taste vectors. The app gets the basic job right.
The 2024 next-generation rewrite — still the current shipping version on the Amazon Appstore — leaned harder into that identity. Custom presets let you pin up to fifteen stations, playlists, podcasts, or artist radios to a single shelf. Live radio now shows synced lyrics for the song currently playing, which iHeart claims is an industry first and which, more importantly, actually works. Talk Back, the in-app voice-message feature that lets listeners send 30-second clips to participating stations, has matured from gimmick to a quietly recurring fixture on morning shows.
What iHeartRadio is not, on Fire hardware or anywhere else, is a Spotify replacement. The on-demand music library is a fraction of Spotify’s, the recommendation engine is less sharp than Pandora’s Music Genome work, and the All Access subscription is priced at a level that only makes sense if you genuinely want one app to do live radio and on-demand together.
If you live in the radio half of that Venn diagram, this is still the app to install.
iHeartRadio is the rare audio app that treats terrestrial broadcasts as the headline act, not a nostalgia tab buried three menus deep.
FEATURES
Free, ad-supported access to thousands of live AM/FM stations across the United States, plus a podcast catalogue that runs from the iHeartPodcast Network's tentpoles down to small local shows. Artist Radio builds Pandora-style stations from any seed artist; on-demand playlists and song search are gated behind iHeart All Access.
The 2024 redesign added a presets shelf (up to 15 mixed slots covering stations, playlists, podcasts, and artist radios), a Trending discovery feed for top podcasts and playlists, and live-radio lyrics that scroll in time with whatever song the FM signal is playing. Talk Back is a microphone button on participating stations that records up to 30 seconds and routes the clip to the show's producers. On Fire hardware the app casts cleanly to Echo speakers and remembers Alexa-linked accounts.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The free tier is genuinely generous — live radio, podcasts, and Artist Radio with no paywall, and ads that lean closer to broadcast spot loads than streaming-app interruption density. Presets are the right answer to the "I just want my four stations" use case that competitors keep solving with playlists.
Live-radio lyrics are the rare new feature that earns its press release. Watching the words to a song scroll while a local DJ talks over the intro is mildly surreal and surprisingly useful in a noisy kitchen.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
All Access at $9.99 a month buys you a smaller catalogue than Spotify or Apple Music at the same price, with weaker recommendations than Pandora at half the price. The upsell prompts inside the free app are frequent enough to feel out of step with the otherwise easy-going free tier.
Amazon Fire reviews flag recurring playback failures and connection drops on older tablet hardware — not universal, but persistent enough that a fresh install is worth trying before a subscription is. The on-Fire-TV companion app is a separate listing and doesn't share presets cleanly with the tablet build.
CONCLUSION
Install the free version on any Fire tablet you keep around the house — it's the closest thing to a modern transistor radio that ships in 2026. Skip All Access unless you've already tried Spotify and Pandora and found them wanting. Watch whether iHeart extends Talk Back beyond morning-show novelty into something podcast hosts actually use.