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Comment by JuniperMesos | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.

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> I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone

One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports!

Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium.

Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it.

Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.

I suppose Auracast could be used for that, which is a broadcast audio feature of Bluetooth Low Energy [1].

My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auracast?oldid=1346244865

I have never had any interest in live sports and I was genuinely unaware of this use case.

Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example. It's just a choice of the manufacturer to do not implement it completely, sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software. Several years ago there was SpiritFM application for Android that allowed to use FM radio on smartphones that sometimes never supported FM radio... oficially. So the only missing piece is sometimes only the software. As a result I think it wouldn't cost somewhat noticeably more to have that feature.

>Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example

Who told you this? They are wildly different frequencies and encoding.

Twenty years ago this would have been wrong with a kernel of truth. Today, it's just wrong. There were chips that integrated all this but they weren't that popular in the West and ultimately nobody cared.

https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/mediatek-announces-world...

MTK still has the largest marketshare of smartphone SoCs worldwide and they still use their combo RFICs.

https://pccentral.net/q1-2026-smartphone-soc-market-share-me...

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/03/mediatek-leads-glob...

And it's not a tiny kernel of truth, even iPhone(2007) had Wi-Fi/BT combo chips with FM radio. Apple was partly responsible for death of FM radio, by not implementing the software feature. That's also literally 20 years ago.

I don't know about "most smartphones," but the FM bits were commonly a built-in with Qualcomm and some other chipsets for a coon's age.

Even the OG Motorola Droid, of 2009, had the parts inside for an FM radio. They just weren't connected to an antenna and the default software stack didn't include any access to those parts at all.

Flagship Qualcomm-equipped Samsung phones up to the S20 or so tended to be ~similar: The FM tuner guts were usually in there, but they often weren't available to use, and even then they sometimes lacked an antenna.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. :)

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In my time, I've enabled FM radio on a few different phones that weren't advertised to have that function, sometimes with root-only hacks from grimy corners of the internet, and sometimes by just installing some software that just happened to have the right hooks.

This has absolutely nothing to do with similarity with BLE radio and it’s 2.4Ghz antenna. And a far cry from most smartphones.

Thank you for the input.

I'm not here to argue, nor to support claims that I have not made.

The 3.5mm jack is the other missing piece required for that FM receiver to work - and that's not coming back any time soon.

I've never had a phone without one.

Good thing you're the majority of people, then.

My Moto X4's FM radio worked well enough without the headphones plugged in, but you needed really good reception.

Right, you'd need a really strong signal.

Also, I believe that is exactly the reason why FM tuners are being phased out.

Streaming services will nowadays give you uninterrupted playback pretty much anywhere, even in places like large buildings or subway tunnels, where radio coverage is nonexistent. Basically it all boils down to the fact that cell network coverage is much better today.

would make phones somewhat more expensive

"somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more.

I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.

How much would an additional frequency cost to add to a sophisticated radio?

I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.

Thought it was that executives decided that forcing you into the media store was much more lucrative.

> I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.

Ha!

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