App · iOS
Faraway Radio
Spin the globe. Adventure begins.
Faraway Radio is an iOS world radio app with an adventure twist: spin a 3D globe and listen to wherever it stops. Over 60,000 live stations.
Requires iOS 18 or later.
How it is built
The app is native Swift. SwiftUI for the interface, RealityKit for the globe with custom Metal shaders for the atmosphere and the day-night line, and SwiftData for the library. There is no backend of our own.
Station data comes from the community-run Radio Browser directory. An offline pipeline cleans it, places each station by city, and classifies it into about 120 sound families and styles; the result ships inside the app as a compact catalogue, so browsing and filtering never wait on the network.
The globe uses NASA satellite plates compressed to ASTC textures. The sky over a station follows its local time and weather, fetched from MET Norway per station. Song recognition uses ShazamKit with artwork and store links from MusicKit.
The app is localized into 32 languages from one English source, with a script that syncs, exports and merges the catalogues. The library syncs between devices with iCloud. Monetisation is a single StoreKit non-consumable; no ads, no analytics SDKs, no account.
- Platform
- iOS 18 and later
- Year
- 2026
- Language
- Swift
- UI
- SwiftUI
- Globe
- RealityKit, Metal
- Storage
- SwiftData, iCloud sync
- Audio
- AVFoundation, ShazamKit, MusicKit
- Data
- Radio Browser, NASA, MET Norway
- Stations
- 60,000+
- Languages
- 32
- Backend
- None
- Price
- Free, one-time unlock