While many predicted radio to die a slow, painful death with the advent of television, that wasn’t the case. In fact, radio platforms continue to thrive, even with the supercharging of smartphone technology. The folks at TuneIn understand this notion pretty well and have evolved accordingly to offer one of thebest Android appsout there. Its makers recently rolled out the exciting new global radio discovery feature known asTuneIn Explorer, offering a detailed map view of radio stations from all over the world, with a selection of over 100,000 stations. While this feature was exclusive to the web version of TuneIn until now, the company announced Monday that it’s now making its way to the TuneIn Radio apps on Android and iOS.
Users don’t need to make any changes, with the feature being accessible by tapping the Radio tab on the top, perTechCrunch. However, I couldn’t find the feature here (India), so TuneIn is likely limiting the scope of this initial rollout based on geography. This is a fun way of discovering radio stations from a specific country directly within the app. However, this is already possible by navigating to the “By Location” pill on the top of the Android app’s home screen, located in the same row as For You, Local Radio, Sports, Trending, etc. Explorer should be accessible from both the standard TuneIn Radio and the Radio Pro apps.
The screenshot you see above comes from the iOS version. Nevertheless, it gives us a general idea of Explorer’s functioning on the mobile app. Users can zoom in and out as they please, picking the stations from any country as they swipe or scroll through. There’s also a search button below if you’d like to jump to a particular destination directly.
TuneIn CEO Richard Stern and SVP of product engineering Moksha Adyanthaya told TechCrunch that people who have used the Explorer feature since February listen to twice the number of stations than users who haven’t tried it yet. While the obvious benefit of Explorer is to discover new radio stations from any corner of the world, people who stay abroad will also find it comforting to know what’s happening back home.
