I’m used to watching smartphone features vanish with barely a goodbye. Removable batteries disappeared, headphone jacks followed, and microSD slots have been shuffled toward cheaper phones. These are all part of a long list of features Samsung Galaxy phones have dropped over the years. FM radio slipped away with even less fanfare.
So seeing a proper FM Radio app on a Moto G caught me off guard. If you grew up after streaming took over, this is the same FM broadcast you hear in a car or on a kitchen radio. The phone receives a station directly from a nearby transmitter rather than streaming it over the internet, so there’s no account to sign in to and no mobile data involved.
FM hasn’t vanished from every phone sold worldwide. Xiaomi still includes it on models such as the Redmi 13x in international markets, while Honor’s Play10 supports FM in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America. Those aren’t phones most US shoppers will routinely come across, though. Motorola stands out because it still keeps FM alive in Moto G models sold for the US market in 2026, where the feature has largely disappeared from the familiar names on store shelves.
Motorola still has a tiny radio hiding in plain sight
Streaming somehow made tuning a station feel old-school
The Moto G 2025 is a good example. It has an FM radio alongside a 3.5mm headphone jack, and Motorola includes an FM Radio app for tuning local stations. When you plug in wired headphones and pick a frequency, the phone behaves a lot like the pocket radios many of us grew up with.
The newer Moto G Power 2026 keeps the feature too. Once a wired headset is connected, you can tune to local stations and then send the sound through the phone’s loudspeaker or a paired Bluetooth device. Motorola does attach one caveat: if FM matters to you, look for an explicit FM Radio listing for the exact model and carrier version rather than assuming a headphone jack is enough.
The headphone cable is part of the radio setup because it doubles as the antenna. You can redirect the sound afterward, but the cable still needs to stay connected to receive the station. That is why older phone radio apps would refuse to start until you plugged in a pair of wired headphones.
Calling this an “FM chip” is useful shorthand, although the hardware has often been bundled into a larger connectivity chip. Qualcomm’s WCN3660, for example, combined Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM support on a single piece of silicon. A phone can therefore contain hardware capable of receiving FM and still have no usable radio unless the manufacturer also provides the antenna path, audio routing, software, testing, and support needed to make it work. That gap was common enough that people once looked for ways to unlock supposedly hidden FM radios in their phones, although many models lacked the necessary hardware or software to do so.
Motorola’s own lineup shows the difference. The Moto G Power 2025 has a 3.5mm headset jack but no FM support, while the 2026 model has both. The socket alone does not include FM. Motorola still has to make the feature work on the phones where it chooses to offer it.
FM didn’t disappear because radio waves stopped working
The smartphone industry found shinier things to keep
FM-capable hardware used to be quite common in smartphones, even when owners could not actually use it. NAB Labs [PDF] found that in 2014, 69% of top-selling US smartphones had FM hardware installed but not enabled for users. Only 19% had FM reception enabled by at least one major US carrier.
What changed was everything around the radio. Headphone jacks disappeared to the point that switching back to a phone with one now feels unusual; streaming became the default way to listen to music and live stations; and wireless earbuds removed the cable that many phones had used as an FM antenna. Keeping terrestrial radio alive still meant dealing with antenna routing, software, testing, and support, while fewer buyers were likely to care whether the feature survived.
You can see where that trend ended up by looking at the phones dominating US shelves now. Current iPhones, Pixels, and mainstream Galaxy phones don’t offer terrestrial FM reception, though a few US-market holdouts remain. TCL, for example, still lists wired FM radio on the 60 XE NXTPAPER 5G, right alongside a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Motorola is a more conspicuous holdout because FM keeps resurfacing across the familiar Moto G family even as it has disappeared from most mainstream US phones.
I suspect the Moto G line also gives FM a friendlier place to survive than a recent flagship. These phones still compete partly on practical hardware features, much like cheap Android phones that still lack features found on $1,000 flagships, and the headphone jack has lasted longer here than it has on premium phones. If the necessary radio hardware is already available, keeping FM usable can give buyers one more thing their phone can do without requiring another subscription, app account, or data connection.
FM obviously can’t follow you across the country like an internet station, queue up an on-demand episode, or work when there’s no transmitter nearby. What it can do is pull in a local broadcast directly without using mobile data or Wi-Fi, and it may still be available when cellular networks are down or overloaded during an emergency. I’d still keep a battery-powered radio in any serious emergency kit, but having another way to hear local information on the phone already in your pocket doesn’t strike me as much of a relic.
I’m glad somebody forgot to remove it
I don’t expect FM radio to stage a glorious smartphone comeback, and I wouldn’t choose a phone solely because it can tune to 101.5 MHz. I like that a modern device can still receive a local broadcast directly, rather than turning every form of media into an internet request.
Phones now come with 5G modems, satellite features, and increasingly elaborate AI hardware. Somewhere in the Moto G family, though, there is still room for one of the simplest wireless tricks a phone ever learned. I hope Motorola keeps forgetting that it is supposed to be obsolete.