Listen Now

Podcasts and live radio with on-device AI picks, summaries and a private journal of what you heard. No account, no tracking, no ads. It all stays on your phone.

Listen Now is a calm place to find podcasts and live radio — and to remember what you heard — without an account, without tracking, and without the endless feed. You open it, see a small, considered set of things to play, and press start.

It begins with a simple question: what could I listen to now? Instead of a wall of thumbnails, Listen Now suggests a few good options that fit the time you actually have.

PICKS FOR THE TIME YOU HAVE Three time chips — 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or 60+ — tailor each suggestion to your moment. A quick gap before a meeting or a long walk home, the picks fit.

WHAT'S IN THE AIR RIGHT NOW A short, honest read on the specific stories your unplayed episodes are actually talking about — surfaced on-device, and biased towards what more than one show is covering. Tap one to start the episode behind it.

A JOURNAL OF WHAT YOU HEAR Every episode you finish is quietly distilled into a private journal: a short summary, the key ideas worth keeping, and a searchable record of what you listened to. Ask it in plain language — "that thing about interest rates" — and it finds the moment. It's the opposite of a feed you forget.

ON-DEVICE AI, NOT A PROFILE ON A SERVER The picks, the summaries and the transcripts are computed on your phone — using Apple's on-device Foundation Models and a bundled on-device model. Podcasts can be transcribed and summarised locally; live radio is transcribed as it streams. Your taste, your history and what you heard never leave your device.

PODCASTS, YOUR WAY Search the Apple catalogue, follow the shows you love, or add any podcast by pasting its RSS feed. Each show has its own "how to listen" strategy — play in order, newest first, or latest only — so narrative series catch up in sequence while news shows surface the latest episode.

LIVE RADIO FROM AROUND THE WORLD Search a global station directory, or start with curated UK defaults including BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM. Add your own custom streams whenever you like.

LISTEN ANYWHERE, EVEN OFFLINE Background downloads keep episodes ready for the tube, a flight or a dead spot. Intelligent auto-download stays ahead of you, and downloaded-episode cleanup keeps things tidy.

A PROPER PLAYER AirPlay, lock-screen and Now Playing controls, a sleep timer, variable speed, and resume exactly where you left off. A home and lock-screen widget puts your next listen one glance away.

YOUR PRIVACY, BY DESIGN Privacy here isn't a setting — it's how the app is built.

• No account, no sign-in, no password. Just open it and listen. • No analytics, no tracking, no advertising SDKs, and no third-party SDKs at all. There's no App Tracking Transparency prompt because there's nothing to track. • On-device AI. Recommendations, summaries and transcripts run locally, so your history stays on your phone. • Local-first. Your library, journal, history and progress live on your device. • Optional private sync — through your own iCloud, using Apple's end-to-end private CloudKit. Never a third-party server. • The only network requests fetch the content you ask for: podcast search, the station directory, and the actual audio. No behavioural data is collected or sold.

That's why Listen Now maps cleanly to an App Store "Data Not Collected" privacy label.

Open it. Find something for right now. Listen — and remember what you heard.