In an era where even the bloated corpse of X (nee Twitter) remains an indispensable tool for getting real-time updates and highlights from sporting events, Apple is slowly making the free Apple Sports app a more essential tool for keeping up with your favorite sports.
To that end, Apple says that the latest Sports update adds real-time scores for NFL games and college football. Previously, real-time updates were available for other in-season sports like baseball and the WNBA, so with the NFL kicking off next week and college football already underway, it's a pretty timely update from Apple.
It's not just real-time scores, though. Included within the update are real-time statistics, live betting odds and a "dynamic drive tracker" that visuals where ball is on the field.
Apple Sports already had betting odds when it launched, but if you're like me and don't care about gambling there's an easy way to make that information go away. It's unclear, as of this writing, whether or not turning off betting odds will work on the real-time updates.
In the Apple Sports app you can follow your favorite team, conference or sports for updates including the Premier League, NBA, and NCAA basketball to name a few different followable leagues. A drop-down menu is supposed to release "later this year" that allows you to switch between games and leagues easier.
For smartwatch users, the new version provides the ability to get live updates right on your Apple Watch via iOS 18 and watchOS 11 upgrades, which is pretty cool.
To be fair to Apple, the Apple Sports app only launched in late February of this year, in time for baseball's spring training to get going. However, as Tom's Guide editor Philip Michaels noted at the time, the simple app was merely "fine" if it stumbled a little bit out of the gate. Unless you really like the Apple aesthetic, it was hard to choose over more established scoring apps like ESPN, TheScore, and CBS Sports.
The problem with dedicated sports apps is that outside of the scores, and occasional news recaps and previews, they don't offer much. ESPN has highlights which is good but those can get locked behind obscure paywalls. TheScore has fan communities chatting during games but that's locked into a live chat system that makes it hard to follow. Unfortunately, Elon Musk's degraded X remains one of the best places to follow scores, get highlights, and see fan responses in real-time, despite a growing unreliability.
As Apple upgrades the Sports app, perhaps it'll become the one-stop app for scores and updates. If it can ever get real-time highlights and maybe a moderated comment section it'll become the app to beat.
