Not having a radio receiver in a phone has always been one of those WTF things for me. There have been articles on why iOS doesn't have a radio tuner even those the receiver is there claiming because it would divert users from apple music or whatever. It's always felt like a missed opportunity to me though
The main reason to not have it is that unless you’re out of cellular range or has no data quota left, it’s just worse than just streaming the same stations over the internet, which also offer more content as running FM stations is expensive.
Even though older iPhone baseband chips had FM receivers, you’d still need break it out and deal with the antenna setup, with the approach taken by others requiring wired headset and shenanigans in the headphone port. That’s more BOM, and user resistance to wireless headphones or newer models whose baseband chips cut the feature.
It used to be a somewhat common feature in phones (including smartphones from other brands), but it usually had quite “eh” reception. And with transitions to DAB, the feature becomes unusable without DAB decoders which I’m sure someone is claiming royalties for.
There's one place where I still bring my old cell phone to use the FM receiver part: sports events. It's nice getting the announcers live instead of on a broadcast delay + digital buffer. Through the internet it's usually several seconds behind the action but on the local low power FM broadcast it's practically zero latency.
