Phones should have FM radio again (as an emergency safety feature)

i hate how every quality of life feature now has to be pitched as essential safety, instead of simply being there because it's good. can't have quality anymore unless it's literally necessary

Analogue radio is getting shut down in favor of digital broadcasts, so I doubt this would truly be helpful in many areas.

Phones should have FM radio not as an emergency feature, but as a method of banging out the tunes. I wanna jam out at a campsite with no downloaded music and no cell service.

Germany barely has FM anymore - it's due to be shut off in the next few years.

my phone has an fm radio but it needs wired headphones

Is this the latest "sneaky" way to insist all phones need headphone jacks?

Because from an emergency standpoint: Most (all?) cars still have analog radios and it is generally encouraged to have a "weather radio" in any emergency kit. Hell, many building emergency kits will have one (even if it is just the shitty radio the rent a cop uses to listen to The Game in the booth). And in the event of a disaster, you really do want to group up. If only because it makes you an easier target for satellites and rescue flights.

So, from an emergency preparedness perspective, this seems like an incredibly niche situation where people are completely isolated, don't have a car, but still need to tune in to an emergency radio broadcast to figure out where to go and it is not "go to the nearest population center that is not a smoldering wreck".

While not a physical radio, a Linux phone such as the Librem 5 in conjunction with an RTL-SDR dongle and external antenna may be a good candidate for a mobile software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver.

SDR frameworks such as GNUradio or REDHAWK are well-established by this point. Newer versions of REDHAWK are designed to run on CentOS/Rocky Linux, however, and they don't (AFAIK) come with a mobile-friendly UI.

I do know that there are some web-based SDR tools in the wild. I'm not very familiar with them, their system requirements/capabilities/limitations, but they could be worth a look to jump-start a Progressive Web App for mobile devices.

I keep a small solar/crank generator/USB-powered radio in my car. Which can provide USB power, act as a light, and also, in a pinch, charge my cellphone. You can get these starting at about $13 on Amazon.

That's not quite as good as having one with everyone, but as long as you're within walking distance of your car, you can probably get to it. It also has some benefits:

• More power-friendly than a cell phone.

• At least a portion of the kinds of things that might take out the cell infrastructure (e.g. cyberwarfare targeting the cell system) may also take out phones themselves, like if someone can push bad updates out to the phones. Your dead-simple FM radio isn't going to have problems unless actual FM radio broadcasters get knocked out. If you're in the US, there is very little real opportunity for someone to conduct a significant, conventional attack on the country, but being able to find holes in the Internet-connected infrastructure and do damage there has a lot more unknowns and the ability of various parties to disable or destroy it is much more of a possibility. Militaries do build up collections of holes to hit adversaries with. One of the first things Russia did when invading Ukraine was to knock out Viasat infrastructure, using a hole that they'd discovered in that company's network, to degrade communications in Ukraine by pushing out an update to brick satellite modems. I also remember some guy at a think tank in the US that covers cyberwarfare saying that one of the surprises was that Russia didn't try to disable Ukraine's cell network, either via cyberwarfare or via conventional means; taking out the cell network would do a lot to dick up a country.

They would have to put the headphone jacks back in since the wires were the antenna

There’s another type of radio that could save lives if implemented in smartphones. In the United States, the NOAA runs a network of radio towers that broadcast up-to-the-minute weather reports and automated alerts, which are specifically designed to stay running during tornadoes and other emergencies. The signals are broadcasted on 162.400 – 162.550 MHz, above the FM band, allowing the signals to travel much farther than regular radio or cell networks.

Higher frequencies travel shorter distances and permeate through buildings and trees less, so 162.4 - 162.55 MHz is going to be worse than the rest of the FM band (but still better than cell frequencies).

Some phone today do have that. Service providers like to disable the feature though

... my last phone had fm radio that didn't need headphones to work or even internet. My new phone needs headphones to work.... why are y'all buying expensive phones with no features???!

Germany got it removed for more than 6 years ago. My last capable phone was the Samsung S3.

Maybe the 3.5mm jack and headphones could double as an antenna!

I'd say AM radio is a better safety feature for Australians at least, since the ABC broadcast emergency warnings via their AM stations.

I'm still mad that they got rid of the headphone jack since I can't access my radio anymore.

iPhones never had the feature anyway but they should add it, at least through the USB-C port on their newest devices.

Or you could...ya know...just use the emergency safety features.

This is a ploy by broadcasters. Just like "think of the children!!" - they want more listeners to toss more ads at. They've been tossing this article around for a bit now, under the guise of "safety", because they are losing listeners.