No radio on a Bose SoundTouch speaker? Why, and what still works

TuneIn radio and the preset buttons on Bose SoundTouch speakers went through a cloud service. That service ended on 6 May 2026. The old presets are not coming back: they pointed at a cloud ID, not at a stream. Internet radio and 6 new presets, kept in an app, work again over your own wifi — as long as the station offers a plain-HTTP stream.

Why the radio and the preset buttons stopped

The official app worked by way of Bose servers: your phone asked the cloud, and the cloud asked the speaker. When those servers were retired, everything that travelled that route went with them — including the preset buttons on the speaker itself, which felt local but were not. TuneIn internet radio took the same route, which is why the radio and the buttons went quiet on the same day.

When it happened

• 18 Feb 2026 — Original shutdown date. Later postponed by Bose.
• 6 May 2026 — SoundTouch cloud effectively shut down. Presets, music-service browsing and TuneIn stop working.
• 15 May 2026 — Account data deleted. The account and the data held with it are removed.

The date moved once. A February shutdown was announced and then postponed, and the service ran until May.

What stopped working

• The 6 preset buttons on the speaker itself
• Browsing and playing music services from the app
• TuneIn internet radio
• The account, and the data held with it

What kept working

• The speaker — it was never the part that stopped
• Bluetooth, AUX and AirPlay, none of which went through the cloud
• The local API the speaker has always had, which is why an app on your own wifi can still control it

Why the old presets cannot come back

A preset never stored a stream address. It stored an identifier that only meant something to the service that has now been retired, so there is nothing left for it to point at. No app can read them back, whatever it does — a replacement set is necessarily a new one.

Why some stations will not play

The speaker's firmware can fetch a plain-HTTP stream but not an HTTPS one. Most stations still publish a plain-HTTP address next to the secure one, and those play normally; a station offering only HTTPS cannot be played on this hardware by any app. It is a limit of the firmware, and no firmware has been published since the shutdown.

A speaker that is not on your wifi yet

Local control only begins once the speaker is on the network, so a second-hand or factory-reset unit has to be put on wifi first. The last official Bose SoundTouch app still does that, and needs no account for it. After that, a local app can take over.

The API that makes a local app possible

In January 2026, Bose published the SoundTouch Web API — the documentation for the local API the speaker has always had — under public terms of use that permit independent apps. That is what an app like Mast is allowed to build on, and it is why the speakers you own can still be controlled from your phone, with no account and nothing in between.

How to get internet radio and 6 presets back

Anything that runs on your own network still works. Mast is one such app: it speaks the same local API the official app used at home, so control never leaves your wifi and there is no account and no server in between. Internet radio comes back — the streams themselves still arrive from the stations, as they always did — and so do presets: 6 of them, kept in the app on your phone rather than on the speaker's own buttons, which stay as they are.

In practice it takes four steps. Make sure the speaker is on your wifi; a unit that is not yet on the network is put there with the last official app, as described above. Install Mast on a phone on the same wifi and let it find the speaker. Search for a station and play it. Press and hold a preset to save it there. From then on a tap plays it, with no internet needed for the control itself.

Two limits are the hardware's, not the app's. The speaker has to be on firmware 27.x, which every unit that kept receiving updates until the shutdown has. And a station must offer a plain-HTTP stream — most do; one that offers only HTTPS cannot be fetched by the speaker's firmware — a limit of the hardware, not of Mast.

Mast is an independent product and is in no way connected to, approved by or sponsored by Bose Corporation.