- Apple's new sports app focuses on scores and betting odds, lacking highlights and news.
- The app is a step towards potentially becoming a betting app, showcasing a different direction for Apple in the sports industry.
- Despite being sleek and intuitive, the Apple Sports app mainly offers scores and betting odds, with no highlights or news.
Apple launched a new sports app that focuses on scores and betting odds, lacking highlights and news. The app is seen as a step towards potentially becoming a betting app, showcasing a different direction for Apple in the sports industry.
Always improving: On Tuesday, I downloaded the new Apple Sports app just before watching basketball on TNT, and soon noticed something strange: The scores on the app were ahead of the telecast. Launched last week, the Apple Sports app is mostly sleek and mostly intuitive, as Apple products tend to be. But it’s also something of a misnomer. Apple Scores would be a better name for the app, because it does almost nothing else. Unlike ESPN and the many other major sports apps you can download to track scores and follow games, it offers no highlights. There is no news. The app doesn’t even show what channel or streaming service the games are airing on.
Deeper details: Nor does it show the results of any game more than a day ago, or any team’s schedule more than a single game in advance. And yet what it does show you is betting odds, prominently displayed in the home screen. Click on a specific game, and you’ll get detailed betting odds, such as odds for the total number of points that will be scored in a game, all provided by the sports-betting juggernaut DraftKings. You can hide these details in your iPhone’s general settings, and the app doesn’t link to DraftKings, where you can actually put money down. But this seems to be the crux of the app. It’s the beginning of a betting app.
Looking ahead: Apple, he added, is not against betting. Even the idea that Apple would flirt with betting is curious, because the company has traditionally been pretty averse to anything that could be construed as a vice. Its extensive rules prohibit apps that encourage the use of tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol. The same is true of anything promoting the illegal or reckless use of weapons and dangerous objects. And also overtly sexual or pornographic content—no surprise from the famously prudish company.
Who its for:: If Apple doesn’t see sports gambling as a vice, though, maybe that’s because America no longer sees it as a vice. Only in 2018 did the Supreme Court let states allow online sports betting. Now it has become so normalized that commentators regularly discuss betting lines, throwing around lingo about parlays and prop bets. Entire TV shows and podcasts are devoted to gambling. ESPN has its own betting service. Sports betting has eaten sports alive, and not without consequence: Calls to gambling-addiction hotlines are way up since 2018.
