There is a good chance the phone in your pocket has an FM radio receiver built into it. Not a software simulation. A physical tuner, sitting on the cellular modem chip, capable of pulling free broadcast radio out of the air without using a single megabyte of your data plan.
You cannot use it. And the reason why is one of the more interesting stories in modern consumer electronics — a collision of hardware design, business incentives, and a quiet policy battle that never really ended.
The short version
FM radio disappeared from smartphones for four reasons:
- The headphone jack died, and the headphone wire was the antenna.
- Streaming made more money for carriers and manufacturers.
- Chipmakers stopped including FM in 4G and 5G modems.
- Apple removed the hardware entirely starting with the iPhone 7.
Each of these is a real, documented reason. Together, they created a situation where most people do not even realize what they lost.
Reason 1: The antenna was in the headphone wire
This is the technical fact that most people never learn. In almost every smartphone that had FM radio, the FM antenna was not a separate component. It was the headphone cable itself.
When you plugged in a pair of wired earbuds, the wire became a long, thin receiving antenna. The phone's FM tuner routed the signal from the cable into the audio pipeline[reference:4]. This was an elegant engineering trick: it meant no extra antenna had to be squeezed into the phone's case.
When smartphone makers began removing the 3.5mm headphone jack in the mid-2010s — Apple with the iPhone 7 in 2016, then Samsung, Google, and most other Android manufacturers following — the FM antenna disappeared with it. USB-C headphones and Bluetooth earbuds do not have the same physical characteristics, so the trick no longer works[reference:5].
Remove the jack, remove the antenna, remove the radio. Nobody had to make a decision about FM radio specifically. It was a side effect.
Reason 2: Streaming pays better than broadcast
FM radio is free. That is the problem.
When you listen to FM, no one bills anyone. No data plan is consumed. No ad exchange is engaged. Your carrier gets nothing. Streaming, by contrast, consumes mobile data — which carriers charge for — and streaming apps run on top of ad networks and subscription platforms that generate ongoing revenue for the app developer and the platform.
This is not speculation. In 2013, the broadcaster Emmis Communications launched an app called NextRadio specifically to bring FM reception to smartphones. Emmis convinced Sprint to preload the app on its devices — paying Sprint up to $15 million per year to do so[reference:6]. Sprint's motive was clear: enabling FM listening on its phones was not a business it wanted to invest in.
When the program wound down in 2016, the CTIA — the trade group representing wireless carriers — publicly stated that there had been a "lack of demand from cell service customers" for the feature[reference:7]. Whether that was a cause or a convenient excuse is a matter of perspective. But the incentive structure was not ambiguous.
Reason 3: 4G and 5G chips left FM behind
FM tuners had traditionally been bundled into the modem chips made by Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others. As the industry moved from 3G to 4G and then to 5G, the modem architecture changed. New features had to be prioritized. FM was not one of them.
According to industry analysis, Qualcomm and MediaTek both excluded FM radio from their chipsets as the world moved to 4G and 5G technologies[reference:8]. Adding FM back would have required additional silicon area, additional power draw, and — critically — country-by-country tuning of the receiver to match local FM frequency allocations, which differ from region to region[reference:9].
The power draw point matters. In a smartphone, every milliamp-hour is contested. FM tuners require continuous power to keep the receiver active. Streaming over Wi-Fi or 5G, for all its faults, allows the modem to enter low-power states between bursts. For manufacturers optimizing battery life, the FM tuner lost[reference:10].
Reason 4: Apple removed the hardware
This is the most documented part of the story, and it is the reason the conversation reached the highest levels of U.S. government.
Apple's iPhones had FM receiver capability in their modem chips up to and including the iPhone 6s. Starting with the iPhone 7 in 2016, Apple removed the FM hardware entirely — no chip, no antenna[reference:11].
In 2017, after hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria devastated parts of the United States and Puerto Rico, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Ajit Pai, publicly called on Apple to "activate" the FM chips in iPhones as a matter of public safety. Radio broadcasting groups joined the pressure campaign, arguing that FM radio is a critical lifeline during emergencies when cellular networks fail.
Apple's response was blunt: the chips were not there. iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models did not contain FM radio chips, and did not have antennas designed to support FM signals. There was nothing to activate[reference:12].
The episode revealed two things. First, the FCC had apparently not realized that the FM hardware had been gone for over a year. Second, and more importantly, there is no regulation in the United States that requires a phone manufacturer to include FM radio. The pressure campaign had no legal mechanism behind it. It was a public shaming exercise that ended with Apple stating, correctly, that the feature did not exist[reference:13].
What happened to NextRadio
The most ambitious attempt to keep FM radio on smartphones was NextRadio, launched by Emmis Communications in 2013. It was a hybrid app: it used the phone's FM tuner to receive the live broadcast signal, then displayed supplementary content — song metadata, station logos, advertising — on the screen, delivered over the data connection.
It was, on paper, a sensible idea. Broadcasters could offer interactive advertising. Users could get a richer radio experience without using data for the audio itself. Emmis paid Sprint millions annually to preload it, and later signed deals with LG and Samsung.
NextRadio failed for three reasons[reference:14]:
- No data attribution model. Advertisers could not measure whether an FM radio ad actually led to any action. Without attribution, digital advertising dollars would not flow to FM.
- The radio industry would not fund it. Emmis asked other broadcasters to help finance NextRadio and TagStation, the back-end platform. Most refused. Radio operators were themselves financially strained and did not see the smartphone effort as their responsibility.
- Apple would not participate. Emmis never successfully convinced Apple to include FM tuners in iPhones. Without Apple's cooperation, the platform could not achieve the scale it needed.
By late 2018, NextRadio was effectively wound down. The most serious attempt to keep broadcast radio on smartphones had ended without reaching most users.
How many phones still have FM hardware?
This is where the story gets stranger. According to NAB Pilot research cited in a 2016 study, approximately 2 out of 3 phones had FM receiver hardware on board at that time — but it was not utilized by the manufacturer[reference:15]. Only about 1 in 5 smartphones had FM enabled out of the box by a carrier, and another 1 in 10 had FM capability installed and working in other regions but disabled in the United States[reference:16].
In other words, at the peak of the smartphone FM debate, the vast majority of phones could have received FM radio with no hardware change at all. The tuner was there. It was simply turned off.
Some of that hardware is still present today, particularly in Android devices sold in markets where FM remains popular — parts of Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. But in the United States and Western Europe, the trend has been to remove the tuner entirely at the chip design stage.
Why this matters
FM radio is not just nostalgia. It is the most resilient broadcast medium ever built. An FM signal does not require an internet connection, a cellular tower, or a subscription. When power is out, when cellular networks are overloaded, when the internet goes down — FM still works, as long as the broadcaster is on the air and you have a receiver with a battery.
During the 2023 Canadian wildfires, the 2024 Hurricane Helene response, and the 2025 European heatwave power disruptions, emergency management agencies in multiple countries repeated the same message: keep a battery-powered radio. But most people no longer have one. Their phones cannot receive FM. The one device they carry everywhere cannot do the one thing that works in an emergency.
Some governments have noticed. India's Telecom Regulatory Authority has studied mandating FM capability in phones sold there. The European Union has debated similar measures. In the United States, there is no active federal effort to bring FM back.
What you can do about it
If you want broadcast radio back in your life, you have a few options:
- Buy an Android phone with an active FM tuner. Some models sold in international markets still include working FM. Check the specifications carefully — "FM radio" is often listed as a feature even when the tuner is not enabled.
- Keep a dedicated radio. A small battery-powered AM/FM radio costs less than $20 and will work when your phone will not. This is what emergency management agencies actually recommend.
- Use internet radio for the convenience cases. For everyday listening — in the car, at home, at work — internet radio apps offer a far wider range of stations than FM ever could. The right app can deliver global radio without tracking you or interrupting you with ads.
You will not get the broadcast resilience of true FM from an internet radio app. If the cellular network goes down, internet radio goes down with it. But for the 99% of days when the network is up, a privacy-first internet radio app gives you most of what FM gave you — plus thousands of stations you could never have reached otherwise.
The takeaway
FM radio did not disappear from smartphones because users stopped wanting it. It disappeared because of a chain of decisions that had almost nothing to do with what users wanted: the removal of the headphone jack, the economics of streaming, chip design priorities, and one company's decision to remove the hardware entirely.
Understanding that chain is useful. It helps explain why the audio experiences on our phones today are shaped less by our preferences than by the business models of the companies that built them — and why choosing software that respects you is not a small thing.