22HBG has a gift for 2024: the new version of FM-world, which quickly becomes a trending app in the iOS store

For many radio enthusiasts, this aggregator has become one of the main apps on their phones. To convince you, just look at the battery usage screen of your smartphone: you will probably find a situation not too dissimilar from that of the author (where it ranks second as it is almost always running in the background).

Released in the night between December 23rd and 24th, the App is already in an excellent position in the Italian and French iOS app store rankings, with an upward trend that as of the afternoon of the 24th shows no signs of decreasing. An undoubted sign of the vast user base and of course the curiosity to test the new features.

New Features

But let's get to the news of this version. We had the opportunity to speak with Matteo Rossi and Nico Montanari (development team leaders) and founder Gianluca Busi.

Marco Hugo Barsotti: Matteo, can you tell us about the main new features of this version?

Matteo Rossi: As a substantial new feature, a graphic restyling and the new radio search tab by category. We added charts with the most listened to radios, a service similar to that on the FM-world website in real time.

Localization

M.H.B: The integration with the News from the FM-world.it portal is particularly interesting, but we found that even the foreign versions of the app refer to the news in Italian. Strategically, do you think of the app versions in foreign app stores as an application aimed at Italians abroad or also at international users in general?

M.R.: For the news section for now it only refers to the Italian part and the app is aimed at an Italian audience at the moment. But this does not mean that things cannot evolve in the near future.

TV Section

M.H.B: The video section - or rather TV - seems to me to be a unique feature of your app. In the future, will we also find pure television stations and not just "radiovisions" in the video section?

Gianluca Busi: As you pointed out, the video section is very important as today we are the only radio aggregator that supports visual radios. One of our goals is to also aggregate non-music TVs and with new services for the automotive sector where in the future the video part will be an integral part of the car media. As you know, media consumption in the car is a focus point of mine and I intend to direct much of 22HBG's energy for 2024 precisely on this. As for native TV, we have already included some, in fact let me say that whoever wants to join can send us a request and be included immediately.

M.H.B.: One last question, can you give us a sneak peek of what's coming in 2024?

G.B.: Does Tik Tok tell you anything? Well, we're working on it and we're nearly ready. And we are also discussing with some industry operators of Fast Channels (the famous linear channels that are created to be inserted into the home screens of Samsung and LG TVs) to bring something unique and innovative to the market.