If one thing characterizes the past few years of major app releases, it’s “features users didn’t ask for.” I did not ask for a chatbot inside my email inbox. Nor did I ask for my Instagram search bar to become an A.I. prompting tool, my Google search results to give way to a summarizer bot, or the new iPhone to come with something called “Image Playground.” Tech companies have preferred a ship-first, sort-it-out-later approach. I am not even an anti-A.I. maximalist and have found these and dozens more examples to be annoying.
This includes sports apps, of which I have many. Major League Baseball’s official app, long one of my favorites, has gradually surrounded baseball scores and video with window dressing that has made the app feel heavier. ESPN’s app, my historic home for other sports scores, now prioritizes both its live TV offering and a self-contained TikTok scroll called “Verts,” with the simple score section sitting in a vast sea of other buttons. This is not the world’s biggest problem, but it has created a lot more friction when I’ve tried to use my top sports apps to, well, check sports scores.
Enter the best app Apple has given me in years, one you’d be well served to put on your home screen as the World Cup kicks into gear and sport fans find themselves tracking games across multiple countries, leagues, and time zones: “Sports.”
That is the whole name. It’s not to be confused with Apple TV’s sports offerings, such as MLS matches, Formula One grands prix, or Friday baseball. It’s not in the Apple TV app at all. It’s also not to be confused with the sports section of Apple News. That section is also good, but it’s a different thing.
“Sports” has no news headlines. There are no streaming guides, although you can see a game’s channel if you click on it. When you download the app, you’ll see betting odds adorning the scoreboard, but you can turn them off forever with a simple toggle in the settings.*
There are just team names and logos, team records, game times, and the scores of games in progress or completed. Below that, there’s a standings page. There is almost no advertising, with an occasional exception like Apple putting a banner atop the page to get you to tune in to Apple TV for something. I tolerate these brief incursions, which are far fewer than the ads that load up individual leagues’ official apps. The PGA Tour’s app is more of a billboard than anything else. I don’t even want to know what FIFA has cooked up for the World Cup.
In Apple’s app, the customization is perfect: I pick which leagues and teams show up on a homepage and in my sidebar. Those teams’ scores can show up in my lock screen as Live Activities, or they can not. It’s fast too—lightning fast. I had to turn off automatic Pittsburgh Penguins updates during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, because the Sports app was repeatedly sharing developments before I saw them on my streaming package. I have periodically had the same “problem” with NFL, college football, and college basketball games.
The event coverage is robust. Someone reading this probably has a favorite sport that is not hooked into Apple Sports, but one could easily navigate not just to World Cup matches but to any soccer played in MLS, the NWSL, or roughly 30 other leagues. Ecuadorian Serie A and second-division Bundesliga matches are included, as are men’s and women’s tennis and the LPGA Tour. You can click on a game and see a basic box score, leaderboard, or the teams’ rosters.
That’s especially useful during a global event like the World Cup—when even the most devoted soccer fan is hard-pressed to keep track of every group-stage result, knockout permutation, and concurring match windows. Apple Sports lets you glance at the state of the tournament in a few seconds and get on with your day. There are no design features designed to keep you there for longer.
I have just explained this entire product to you. There are no other mechanics to it. The concept is one of the least futuristic that Apple has implemented in an app in some time, and in fact calls back to the distant past of the pre-Twitter, pre–Instagram Reels sports web. There was a time, up to around 2010, when the only thing most people could do (or even wanted to do) with their phones during their favorite teams’ games was check the scores. Our phones eventually gave us more options, but old-fashioned score-checking got worse. For me, Twitter replaced it for a while, but then Elon Musk made that platform useless for real-time updates. So I fell back into the arms of a proper scorekeeping app.
When Apple announced the app in the winter of 2024, the simplicity of the pitch was almost adorable. There was no verbiage about how the world’s most powerful hardware company would “introduce our audience to the next generation of agentic sports-watching, bringing fans closer to the action than ever before.” There was only an Apple executive laying out the quaint premise: “We created Apple Sports to give sports fans what they want — an app that delivers incredibly fast access to scores and stats.”
Promises made, promises kept!
The Sports app has been one of my two or three favorite consumer tech products of the past two years. One of the others is the Brick, that little piece of plastic that has exactly one job—to make my phone stop working in distracting ways—and executes it to perfection. I do not think of myself as a guy who’s above trying out little bells and whistles. If anything, I’m the opposite. But I’ve found myself moved during this time period by products that say they will do exactly one thing and then do it. They get bonus points if that thing is something I already wanted to do, such as “find out how the Knicks are doing right now.” Congrats to everyone in Cupertino on picking the lowest-hanging fruit in my life. I will use this app forever—or at least until it gets enshittified, should Apple stray from God’s light—and I strongly recommend that you do, too. At least during the NBA Finals or the World Cup. Just turn it off if you’re actually watching the game.
Correction, June 10, 2026: This piece originally misstated that Apple Sports has no betting odds. The app provides betting odds that can be toggled on and off in the settings.
