Apple / music / IHEART: PLAY & LISTEN TO MUSIC
REVIEW
iHeartRadio is still the easiest way to put a real radio station in your pocket.
Free live broadcast streams, a vast podcast library, and a custom-station builder that has aged better than the rest of the iHeart product family.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
iHeart: Play & Listen to Music
IHEARTMEDIA MANAGEMENT SERVICES, INC.
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.8
PRICE
Free
Streaming music apps spent the last decade pretending radio was over. Spotify built playlists, Apple Music built a magazine, Tidal chased high-resolution audio, and somewhere underneath all of it iHeartRadio kept doing the one thing none of them did — pipe a live broadcast from a real station, in a real city, into a phone for free.
That clarity of purpose is why the app has outlived more than one competitor that had better design. Where TuneIn chases sports rights and Audacy chases its own merger, iHeart still treats the AM/FM dial as the product. The custom-station builder is a useful second act, the podcasts side is a competent third, but the reason to install this app is the same in 2026 as it was in 2009.
What’s changed is the upsell. The free tier is still the headline, but the app now spends more screen real estate reminding you that Plus and All Access exist than any version before it. Tolerate that and the core experience is still the best free radio app on iOS.
Where TuneIn chases sports rights and Audacy chases its own merger, iHeart still treats the AM/FM dial as the product.
FEATURES
The app does three things. It streams live broadcasts from thousands of US AM/FM stations the moment you tap one — no account, no preroll past the first ad — and the same player handles iHeart's own digital-only stations alongside them. It hosts a podcast catalogue that's effectively every major US talk and true-crime show plus the iHeartPodcasts originals. And it builds an artist-seeded custom station in the Pandora mould: pick Taylor Swift, get a station that mixes her catalogue with adjacent pop.
CarPlay support is the part most people actually use it for. Hand off from phone to car is one tap, the lock-screen player surfaces station art and skip controls, and Siri can resume your last station with a voice command. There are Bose SoundTouch presets, Sonos casting, and an Alexa skill that takes "play KQED" and resolves it correctly more often than not.
iHeart Plus and iHeart All Access sit on top as paid tiers — unlimited skips, on-demand song play from the radio buffer, offline downloads on the upper tier. The free experience runs with audio ads between songs on custom stations and a banner ad in the player.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The live radio side is the genuine win. Search "WFAN" or "KEXP" and you're listening in under five seconds, with the station's actual current broadcast — DJs, traffic, the local Honda dealer ad — not a curated stream pretending. For anyone who moved away from a hometown station, or who wants their morning commute show on a treadmill in another time zone, nothing else does this as cleanly on iOS.
The podcast experience has caught up to where it needs to be. Variable speed, sleep timer, chapter markers when the show provides them, sync across devices via the iHeart account. It is not Overcast or Pocket Casts, but it is a credible default for people who already use iHeart for music.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The free tier's ad load on custom stations is heavier than Pandora's or Spotify's, and the skip cap still bites in the first ten minutes of listening. The upsell prompts to iHeart Plus appear inside the now-playing screen, which makes the player feel like an upsell surface as much as a player.
The library has gaps that competitors don't. Tens of thousands of non-US stations live on TuneIn but not here, so this is functionally a domestic app. The recommendation engine on custom stations is conservative — pick a 1970s soft-rock seed and you'll hear the same forty songs in rotation for weeks. Search treats station call signs, podcast titles, and song artists as the same input, which produces some genuinely confusing result pages.
CONCLUSION
Install iHeartRadio if you care about US terrestrial radio and want it on your phone and in your car without paying anything. Pay for Plus only if the skip cap and ads on custom stations actively annoy you — for live radio and podcasts, the free tier is the whole product. Anyone outside the US should stick with TuneIn; anyone who wants serious music discovery should stick with Spotify or Apple Music.