EricBall's Tech Projects

And how do you listen to radio now?

Using wireless speakers or headphones?

All smartphones I know use the headphone cable as FM antenna.

If they were going to make the move of replacing the headphone jack with something, I think Apple was idiotic for not moving to USB-C instead. Lightning is shortly going to be another abandoned connector left on the Apple scrapheap of history.

Probably they just want to make money with adapters and terribly sounding Apple headphones.

Unlike many other smartphones (like my HTC-601) iPhones don't receive FM radio (https://9to5mac.com/2015/04/20/fm-radio-iphone/) - so that's not a big problem for Apple. And while it's a nice feature, it's not a must-have for most people. OTOH, the bluetooth speaker I just bought has an FM tuner and it uses the USB cable for the antenna. So maybe if Apple really wanted to they could use the lightning cable as an FM antenna.