The top free UK radio station apps for your iPhone

Some regard radio as an outmoded format, but it’s still the best place to get music without heading for the more utilitarian hotspots like Last.fm and Spotify, or even if you just want to hear a bit of chat between your tunes.

A good few UK FM radio stations have been pretty quick off the mark in getting their radio waves transmitted to the iPhone via a dedicated application, but they’re certainly not all there. We scoured the App Store to see which ones we could find.

The most startling thing we found out was that just about all the major radio stations in the UK are served by one single application made by Global Radio. However, it has been given a minor re-skin for each station. You can still access all the stations from any of the Global Radio applications, so even if you secretly listen to Heart, you can retain your cred by keeping an Xfm icon on your iPhone’s home screen.

These Global Radio applications don’t match the functionality of the top-selling radio hub Wunder Radio, which can pull in just about any radio stream on the net including BBC stations, but then you have to pay £3.99 for the privilege of using it.

In our tests, music suffered under the low bit rates fed through the application, with fidelity lower than you’d expect from DAB or FM radio. This could improve with a stronger signal, but it didn’t seem to be limited by our connection’s bandwidth, but instead by the application’s in-built settings.

We’ll take a more in-depth look at paid-for radio solutions in the future, but here are the radio applications currently available using the Global Radio framework:

Heart
Pop
It may be commonly thought of as a station for middle-aged women, but Heart has a huge audience across the UK. We could connect to more than twenty local variants of the station too, meaning you’ll be able to catch up with your local Heart station just about wherever you are.

95.8 Capital FM
Pop
Being a London station, there aren’t any variants of Capital FM in Global Radio’s network, but it’s the closest alternative to BBC’s Radio 1 available without paying for a more powerful radio app.

Galaxy
Dance/R&B
Although there appears to be a few national variants of the Galaxy radio station, we could only pick up a one.

Classic FM
Classical
Classic FM essentially does what it says on the tin, or at least it would if it you could store radio waves in a tin. In our tests, this style of music fared better than the other music-oriented stations in terms of coping with the relatively low bit-rates transmitted.

LBC 97.3
Talk
Ostensibly a phone-in station, LBC’s full of strange individuals calling up to discuss everyday problems, often with comic results. LBC sounds just about perfect in spite of the limited signal quality.

Absolute
Rock/Pop
What was once Virgin Radio, Absolute has veered ever more towards the middle of the road since its takeover. It has become something of a male counterpart to Heart, playing some fairly soft classic rock tracks alongside modern songs that sound a lot like fairly soft classic rock tracks.

Xfm
Rock
Partnering with Capital as one of the more youth-focused stations available over the Global Radio network, Xfm plays indie and rock tracks, generally originating from the last 10 years.