macOS 14 Sonoma or later
Radio, right on your notch. Click a place on the map and hear what’s playing there right now.
Click a dot on a world map and live radio from that place starts playing. Stations from 160+ countries, on your Mac’s notch, with full macOS media controls.
▚ Live in your browser
A stripped-down version of the app, running right here. Pick a dot, or hit Teleport and let the planet decide. Real streams, real places — no sign-up, nothing installed.
Radio Island
Tuning the dial…
In the real app this sits on your notch, plays through the system audio device and answers the media keys. Here it’s just a web page — so streams that block browsers may not start. Teleport always finds you another one.
◈ Philosophy
Radio Island is a macOS app that turns a world map into a radio dial. It lives in your Mac’s notch — on top of the screen, out of the way. Open it, click a dot on the map, and a live radio station from that place starts playing. Collapse it, and the audio keeps going while the station drifts up into a small strip of text next to your camera.
It isn’t a directory. There’s no list of 40,000 station names to scroll, no genre taxonomy to learn, no account to make. There is a planet, and there are places on it that are broadcasting right now. That’s the whole interface.
Free, no comment, no backend. Radio Island talks to public radio streams and the public Radio Browser directory — nothing about you is uploaded, and there is nothing to sign into.
▚ Mechanics
Four tactile steps from physical hardware to cross-continental airwaves.
Click the notch. The map springs down from the camera housing with the whole planet on it.
A place with radio plays it immediately: a place with several hundred thousand stations shows you the ones nearest your pointer.
The map folds away. The station keeps playing, one line of text wide, above your desktop.
Play/pause, volume and the station name land in Control Center and on the media keys, like any native player.
✦ Capabilities
Engineered for cadence, for late-night listening, and for zero browsing fatigue. Nearly all of it is free — the two Pro controls are marked.
The map Free
Dark ocean, soft country outlines, amber dots where somebody is broadcasting. No station counts, no clusters to drill into — hover a region and the nearby stations fan out so you never have to guess which dot you meant.
Teleport Free Region bias: Pro
A pure random draw across the whole world, tuned to avoid dead streams and to keep landing you somewhere you haven’t been. Pro adds one optional region bias: it steers the randomness, and never filters a station out.
Radio Passport Free
Countries visited, cities encountered, regions explored, unique stations heard. Deliberately lightweight — no leaderboards, no streaks to protect, no achievement grind. Just a quiet map of how far your ears have gone.
Daily Island Free
A single station picked for today, with a bounded number of skips and an explicit retry if the stream is down. It’s a reason to open the app when you don’t have anywhere in mind.
My Islands & History Free
Save any station to My Islands — uncapped, now and always. Your last 10 stations stay in recent history so the one you lost two clicks ago is easy to find again.
Search & Discovery Free
One search field across station, country and city, plus country/region, genre and language filters with sorting. Local results and the live directory come back in a single list — filters and sort ship Free and stay Free.
Collections Pro
Named folders with stable membership, rename and delete. Saving stations is unlimited for everyone — Pro sells the organisation, never the capacity. Existing collections never become read-only.
Context Free
City, country, local time, language, distance and coordinates around each station — the emotional core of listening to a place. Where the directory doesn’t know something, the app says it doesn’t know, instead of inventing it.
◈ macOS-native architecture
Not an Electron wrapper. Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit, sitting where the hardware already put a gap.
AVPlayer with native media-session integration. Control Center and the media keys work because it’s the same API every other Mac player uses — not a re-implementation.
No dock icon, no Space of its own — a menu-bar-class agent that renders into the notch region and gets out of the way when you collapse it.
Full App Sandbox, hardened runtime, notarised build. Keyboard navigation and VoiceOver labels on every control on the island.
✦ Privacy guarantee
No account, no server, no analytics SDK. Saved stations, history and your passport live in a plain JSON file in Application Support on your own Mac. Delete the app and they re gone with it — there is no copy anywhere else.
“No ads” means no ads added by Radio Island. Third-party broadcasts carry whatever their broadcaster puts in them — that’s not a promise we can make for them.
◈ Pricing model
Simple, ethical software. No recurring subscription, no artificially degraded free tier.
€0
The full listening experience, without paying a cent.
Included in the app
€4.99 one time
Everything in Free, plus two exploration controls.
Free is the real product, not a demo. Nothing that ships free will ever be moved behind Pro, and nothing is made worse so the fix can be sold back to you.
▚ Product boundaries
Radio Island is built with specific technical choices. Here are the ones worth knowing before you download.
Coordinates come from the public Radio Browser directory. Some stations sit at a city centroid rather than a transmitter, and a few are simply in the wrong field — the map shows what the directory knows.
If a station goes down, changes URL or geo-blocks your country, that happens outside the app. Playback failures are handled, retried and routed around — they can’t be prevented.
Browsing known stations works without a connection. Listening does not — this is live radio, not a downloaded library, and nothing is recorded or cached to disk.
Your saves and history are local by design. That is the privacy guarantee and the cost of it: two Macs keep two separate sets of islands.
The whole interaction is built on the notch and the macOS media stack. There is no iPhone, iPad, Windows or web version, and none is being quietly worked on.
Requires macOS 14.0 Sonoma or later. Seamless Apple Silicon-optimised binary.
Download on the Mac App StoreNo trial to start, no card to enter, nothing to cancel.