Apple is ready for football.
The tech giant is revamping its Apple Sports app to give users an edge ahead of the upcoming NFL and college football seasons, most notably adding live NFL and college football scores and a new “Drive Tracker,” but also adding new features and functionality.
Perhaps the most notable new feature is support for Apple Live Activities, which updates scores on your iPhone's lock screen without having to open the app.
“The most important thing is the score, and that's what this app is trying to deliver,” Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music, Apple TV+, sports and Beats, said in an interview. The Hollywood Reporter“We're really looking at this from a sports fan's perspective, and we're all sports fans.”
This was also the driving force behind soccer-specific features such as Drive Tracker, which visualizes the hashmarks of a soccer field on-screen, making it easy for users to see their team's progress at a glance.
“We want to make the experience as simple as possible, but at the same time, we want to provide information to our fans in the easiest and best way possible,” Schusser said, “so we thought that the Drive Tracker, for example, was a really simple and great way to visualize what's going on on the field, and that's how we measure everything we do.”
Apple will also be rolling out an enhanced search feature and improved drop-down navigation in conjunction with the changes that will be part of iOS 18. Schusser also noted that the company will be expanding into sports going forward, although developing UIs for all of the world's top sports is complex and will take some time.
“There's obviously a lot of engineering behind this app, trying to really simplify something that's pretty complicated and very fragmented in the market,” he said. “We've said this for a long time, it's no secret, we want to add more leagues to the app, more sports. We don't have anything to announce today, but stay tuned, we'll be talking about other sports, other leagues in the near future.”