TuneIn Radio: Music & Sports

Have long used and enjoyed the app on my iPhone and iPad mini. I recently bought an Apple Watch, and the app is really finicky on the watch, especially when trying to start music or change channels. Once music gets going, the start, stop, rewind/forward, and volume controls work fine, but the Watch’s own audio software allows for that with any audio/video source in use at the time...so nothing gained by having a separate Tuned In app on the watch. Because of the unreliability on the Watch, I end up gravitating back to my phone to get music started and, occasionally, to switch channels. Customer Service told me the Watch app is only a remote control for the phone app....but it is not yet an effective one. Will remove the app from my Watch if the functionality doesn’t improve. Aside from being limited in its ability to function as designed, that design only allows the Watch to display a list (no graphics) of recently listened to stations...cannot bring up favorites or browse or do anything else.

I commented a year ago in agreement with others from several years before that about the “Here’s something you might have missed” audio repeats multiple times per hour (that is, if you listen to a one hour show, you can’t possibly miss it the second, third, fourth time. That is far more annoying than hearing commercials! The author asked for my email address to discuss (as if they were being responsive to a paying customer) and proceeded to take the conversation outside the Apple store. They then ask me what programs I was listening to and came back with a dismissive, “that’s how it normally works” non-response. I know that’s how it works, but it should be fixed, not excused! Paying over $100 / year should justify updating the app to address these repeated subscriber complaints, not keep adding more channels I don’t care about to allow them keep signing up new users. I signed up on their site using PayPal, not through Apple, so I couldn’t unsubscribe via iOS or PayPal directly. After having to hear an accused murderer testify about his bloody wife and son he was on trial for shooting over and over in one hour, I had enough (again), but still hadn’t been able to identify how to cancel the annual auto-pay renewal before it just went through PayPal and now it can’t be cancelled for another year. I will be contacting the authors to ask for a refund if they still won’t fix the repeat content bug (it’s certainly NOT a feature worth paying for.)

Update: The buffering was fixed and worked for a period of months, however recently the ability to pause and playback was removed from the app. Now hitting pause will only save data for a minute or so, then no additional steam is saved and the recording just jumps forward to live. Prior to this the app would save about 30min before jumping to live. This is a huge setback in app performance and makes the app almost useless, since even a short phone call will result in missing part of a broadcast. Hopefully this feature is restored, in the meantime I will unfortunately have to look for a new app. Too bad because I have used this for years and enjoyed it. First of all and probably most importantly, the app content is great. However there are issues with buffering that need to be fixed. The app offers pause and RW/FF functions, but if you pause for even a short time the app will skip ahead midstream once you are playing back the buffered content. Also when playing back buffered content it will randomly repeat a few second long portion several times. Buffering is a feature used on many apps these days and it usually works flawlessly, this app needs to fix these issues to compete. If buffering was fixed this would be a 5 star review.