iHeart: Play & Listen to Music

Almost but not quite 5🌟, would have kept my monthly subscription but it’s way too costly. For just radio I thought, but considering it’s only $15 or so it’s not that bad. It would be great for a disc jockey (DJ) or a wedding event you can actually set up your own play lists so it can just continue playing continuously. Unless you feel the need to have the DJ interact with you like your in a pub or event to interact with the crowd. I’m sure that if you had issues to where you didn’t have a DJ show up for work then this would work for most small town or small scale clubs that’s holding only 50/75 people or so. I will say that most of the time I am able to find just about anything I want to listen when I had the subscription. And I didn’t have to listen to commercials. It’s really nice cause if you are a big music fan who buys a lot of tracks per month then I would just personally purchase a subscription to the iHeartRadio app. It’s just that cool. But being that I don’t buy that much music and I just couldn’t see spending that kind of money per month.

Loved this app on my Windows Phone, installed it when I was forced to switch to iPhone (which has been an inferior user experience in almost every way - it can’t even do autocorrect as well as the WP, but I digress), and it was pretty similar throughout the fall of 2017... logged in today, December, to find everything changed. I can’t figure out how to get to my favorite artist-based station (can find artist in search, but there doesn’t seem to be a station option anymore?) can’t find the Recently Played Songs list once I’m playing a station. It’s fine to change things, but not in such an extreme way that it appears so nonsensical to even fairly on-top-of-things users that they can’t easily find the features that are important to them. I don’t know if it was a web app before, but it must be because I don’t recall downloading an update and everything is just a little off, not polished and smooth like a native app would be. I expected that sort of thing on a minority platform like WP, but it’s really disappointing to have a worse experience on a brand new iPhone. Anyway, this app is in need of some major organizing/UI changes before it can match the user experience of previous versions. If I have to put in hours curating my stations (which looks like the direction this is going), as opposed to having a variety of stations that are good, just need minor tweaks to be great, I’d might as well use Pandora!

When listening to my favorite live radio stations (that already has their own commercials) on this app, very recently with the latest app update, every 15-20 seconds there is a pop up ad, some are just an ad, while others are full video advertisements that pauses the live radio broadcast which is so annoying!! And it just does not stop, the ads just keep on coming no matter how many times you X them out. When listening to iHeart Radio through Apple CarPlay, the ads just keep shutting off the live broadcast, not safe while driving that’s for sure! The crazy thing is that free local radio stations already have commercials we have to deal with which I don’t mind them so much, but now it seems that iHeart Radio wants to take it a step further and give you even more ads for your enjoyment! With all my years using the iHeart Radio app, I’ve never had this many ads and bugs all in just one app, this is insane! And to top that off, you have to pay a monthly subscription to get rid of the ads in the app, I get it, it’s probably an inflation sort of thing, but this is really annoying having to X out of video ads that stop the radio broadcast ever few seconds, at that point, it’s almost unlistenable! Please iHeart radio fix it to where the ads are not as annoying and that don’t disrupt the users listening experience! Thank you!