eargym vs Hearoes: Which Listening App Fits You?

Both apps frame practice as play, and both were updated in mid-2026, so neither is abandoned. The difference is who they are for. eargym is a general hearing app: it checks your hearing, gives you short training games, and tracks your progress over time. Hearoes is built for cochlear implant users, with a ladder that starts at raw sound awareness and climbs toward sentences.

If you want a light daily habit with a hearing check built in, eargym leans your way. If you are a newer implant user who wants structured steps from the ground up, Hearoes leans yours.

eargym comes from a UK team led by Amanda Philpott, a former NHS chief executive who wears hearing aids herself. The app pairs quick hearing checks with short training games, and tracks how you are doing over time. Its checks include an "ear age" test and a short speech-in-noise test, and its games work on skills like telling sounds apart and following speech in background noise.

It is registered as a Class I medical device in the UK and listed with the US FDA, and its own pages are careful to say the checks screen for signs of hearing loss rather than replace a full hearing test. The download is free with limited content; full access runs about $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year on the US App Store. It is English only and phone-first — no iPad and no web version. eargym also sells a separate app for implant users, eargym CI Rehab, priced on its own.

Hearoes comes from Games 4 Hearoes in Australia, built with audiologists and speech pathologists at hospitals. The design is game-first, and the content climbs in modules: everyday sounds first, then pitch and syllables, then vowels and consonants, then short sentences with background noise.

The early start suits newer implant users. Most apps assume you can already follow words; Hearoes begins before that, in the first weeks after activation when the world still sounds like noise. The download is free with limited content; full access is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. It runs on iPhone, iPad, and Android, in English, with no web version. The ladder tops out at sentences — no longer conversations or stories sit above them.

The quick comparison, feature by feature:

Pick eargym if you want a quick hearing check and light games you can do on your phone in a few minutes, and you like watching a trend line over time. Pick Hearoes if you are a newer implant user who wants clear steps from basic sounds up to sentences, and you do not mind paying more for that structure.

One thing neither does: continue past sentences into longer conversations and stories, or let you practice on a computer. If that is what you are after, a third option may fit better.

SoundSteps is our app, so factor that in. It sits between the two: more structured than eargym's quick games, and it keeps climbing past where Hearoes stops. Practice runs from word pairs up through sentences, conversations, and stories, all real recordings, and you decide how much background noise to mix into each one.

It works with any hearing device or none, runs in any browser with nothing to install, and covers English plus Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, French, and more. It costs nothing to use, and your first week includes full access, no card. It is newer than a long-established program, so it does not carry a multi-decade research record — worth weighing as you choose.