Apple Revamps Sports App Ahead of Football Season

Apple is ready for some football.

The tech giant is revamping its Apple Sports app to take advantage of the looming NFL and college football seasons, most notably by adding live NFL and college football scores and a new “drive tracker,” but also with new features and functionality.

Perhaps the most notable new feature: Support for Apple Live Activities, which will see scores updating on the lock screens of iPhones, without the need to open the app.

“The most important thing is going to be what the scores are and and that’s what this app is trying to deliver,” says Oliver Schusser, Apple’s VP of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Sports, and Beats, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We really look at this from the viewpoint of the sports fan, and we’re all sports fans.”

That was also the impetus for the football-specific features, like the drive tracker, which visualizes the hashmarks of a football field on the screen, giving users a simple way to see the progress their team, is making at a glance.

“We want to have the experience be as simple as possible, but at the same time, get the fan to the information in the easiest and the best way possible,” Schusser says. “And so we thought 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 roll out an enhanced search and an improved drop-down navigation in connection with the changes, which will be part of iOS 18. And Schusser notes that the company is committed to expanding its participation in the sports space moving forward, though the complexities of developing UIs for all of the world’s top sports takes some time.

“There’s obviously a lot of engineering sort of at the back of this app, trying to make sure we take something that’s fairly complex and very fragmented in the marketplace and make it really simple,” he says. “We’ve said this all along, it’s not a secret. We’d love to add more leagues, more sports to the app. Nothing to announce today, but stay tuned, and hopefully we’ll talk about some other sports, some other leagues in the near future.”