Apple / news / WISH-TV INDIANAPOLIS
REVIEW
WISH-TV's app is the rare local-news client that earns its install.
Indianapolis viewers rate Circle City Broadcasting's standalone news app well above the local-TV-app average, and the reasons hold up.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WISH-TV Indianapolis
CIRCLE CITY BROADCASTING
OUR SCORE
7.6
APPLE
★ 4.7
PRICE
Free
Local-news apps are a category most people install once, hate, and delete. The reasons are familiar: a national chain owns the station, the chain ships one app for every market it owns, and the result is a brittle template with your city’s logo painted on the front. WISH-TV’s Indianapolis app is built differently, and you can feel it in the first ten minutes.
Circle City Broadcasting bought WISH-TV out of the Nexstar pile in 2019, dropped its decades-long CBS affiliation for The CW, and has run it as a single-market independent ever since. That structure shows up in the app. The home feed is curated, not algorithmic. The push notifications are tagged by category, not blasted. The weather radar is the station’s own, not a generic widget. None of it is flashy — but local TV viewers in Indianapolis rate it 4.7 on the App Store, well above what stations in larger markets manage, and the reasons hold up under use.
Local TV apps usually feel like an afterthought bolted onto a national chain's CMS. This one feels built for one market.
FEATURES
The home tab is a straight news feed weighted to central Indiana — top stories, weather alerts, traffic, and the day's Statehouse coverage. Tap into a story and you get text, photos, and the broadcast clip if one ran. Live streaming of WISH-TV and its sister channels sits one tab over, with replays of the most recent newscasts on demand for viewers who missed the 5pm or 11pm.
Push notifications are split into categories — breaking news, severe weather, traffic, sports — so you can opt into Colts updates without getting every minor crash on I-465. The weather section pulls from the station's StormTrack 8 radar and a multi-day forecast keyed to whatever ZIP you save.
The app is free with ads, no subscription, no account required to watch live.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
This is the part that surprises. Local TV apps usually feel like an afterthought bolted onto a Nexstar or Gray national CMS, with the same five tabs and the same brittle player no matter which market you're in. WISH-TV's app feels built for one market — partly because Circle City Broadcasting only owns this market. The station became independent in 2019 when DuJuan McCoy bought it out of the LIN/Media General/Nexstar chain, switched it from CBS to the CW the same year, and has run it as a standalone since.
The live stream is reliable on cellular and AirPlays cleanly to a TV. Push notifications are tightly categorized, the weather radar loads fast, and the app respects the difference between a tornado warning and a fender-bender — a distinction other local-news apps routinely fumble.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The article reader still drops you back to the top of the feed instead of the next story, which is the single most-requested feature on the Play Store version and would cost a weekend to fix. Video playback occasionally double-starts when a pre-roll ad finishes, requiring a tap to resume. The on-demand library only retains the most recent few newscasts, so if you miss a Friday and come back Monday, Friday is gone.
There's no Apple TV or CarPlay app, which is a real gap for a station whose audience drives I-65 and I-70 daily.
CONCLUSION
If you live in Indianapolis or anywhere the StormTrack 8 radar covers, install it. If you're elsewhere, this is still a useful look at what a local-TV app can be when one company owns one station and ships for one audience instead of templating fifty markets off the same backend.