On Tuesday, I downloaded the new Apple Sports app just before watching basketball on TNT, and immediately noticed something odd.The app score is first of television broadcast. The Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers game was probably showing on my TV in near real time, but it was still behind the app’s ticking game clock.
The Apple Sports app, released last week, is mostly slick and mostly intuitive, as Apple products tend to be. But it’s also a misnomer.apple Score This name is a better name for this app since it doesn’t do much else. Unlike ESPN and many other major sports apps that you can download to track scores and follow games, there are no highlights. No news. The app doesn’t even show you what channel or streaming service the game is on. It also doesn’t show results for games that are more than one day old, or team schedules that are more than one game old.And yet, what is it? do It will be displayed prominently on your home screen, indicating the odds you are betting on.
Click on a specific game to see detailed betting odds, including odds on total points to be won in the game. All of this is provided by sports betting giant DraftKings. You can hide these details in your iPhone’s general settings, but not in the app. Link Go to DraftKings, where you can actually deposit money. But this seems to be the crux of this app. This is the beginning of gambling apps.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the app, but it’s hard to justify the app’s purpose in any other way. If you look at Apple Sports as a competitor to ESPN, it pales in comparison. No news? Any highlights? If you’re an avid soccer fan, this app is basically useless. You can track the top five men’s soccer leagues in Europe alongside MLS, but not the super popular UEFA Champions League or matches between national teams. You can follow your favorite teams and leagues (if you don’t select any, you won’t see anything when you open the app). However, it does not include the NFL or college football. Apple promises these will be available by the start of their respective seasons, but no such promise has been made for tennis or golf, and they are not included in the app.
It also doesn’t make much sense as part of Apple’s broader sports streaming efforts. In 2022, Apple began broadcasting Major League Baseball doubleheaders on Friday nights on its streaming service, Apple TV+. The following year it became the exclusive broadcaster of Major League Soccer and is now potentially preparing a bid of up to $2 billion for the rights to F1 racing. Still, the Apple Sports app doesn’t seem equipped to advance its grand sports streaming ambitions. The app was released on the same day as the start of his new MLS season, but it doesn’t even notify him that he can watch upcoming matches on Apple TV+.
When it comes to betting, it makes much more sense. This app works great no matter how small. It loads very fast and always stays up to date. This is a notable improvement over the ESPN app, which in my experience only updates intermittently and is usually a few minutes behind the action. Maybe he doesn’t care too much whether the score app lags by 2 seconds or 2 minutes. Otherwise, you’ll probably be watching the game on TV or sneaking under the table and streaming it on your iPhone if you like. But if betting during a match is important, the difference between a 2 second delay and a 2 minute delay can mean everything. In those two minutes of his life, the team’s star quarterback you’re betting on may have thrown an interception or been sidelined with a concussion. You’ll definitely want to know this information. All of this suggests that Apple Sports’ usefulness is not so much as a sports app, or really as a scores app, but as a kind of pseudo-betting app.
And in the end it could end up being something like actual gambling app. Apple hasn’t ruled out the possibility of allowing a user to click through and give him access to DraftKings and other sportsbooks. “Whether or not we’ll allow them to tap it and go to DraftKings…we’ll decide later,” Eddie Cue, the Apple executive leading the sports push, told CNET last week. “We just decided now that we would like to give the odds and see what happens.” Apple is “not opposed” to the bet, he added.
Even the idea that Apple would be interested in gambling is interesting, as Apple has traditionally been very averse to anything that could be considered a vice. Its broad rules ban apps that encourage the use of “tobacco or e-cigarette products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol.” The same goes for anything that promotes the “illegal or reckless use of weapons or dangerous materials.” It also contains overtly sexual or pornographic content. This is not surprising for a company known for its solidity. “It’s a cliché, but I don’t think Steve Jobs wouldn’t have agreed to display betting odds in his Apple Sports app,” he said for his MacRumors, which has covered Apple since 2008. senior reporter Joe Rossignol told me via email. “But even today, I don’t believe Apple allows users to place bets directly within the app.” That doesn’t seem to be in line with the company’s ethos.
But if Apple doesn’t consider sports gambling to be a vice, it’s probably because: America I no longer consider it a vice. It wasn’t until 2018 that the Supreme Court allowed states to allow online sports betting. Commentators now regularly discuss betting lines and throw around jargon about “parlays” and “prop bets.” Entire TV shows and podcasts are dedicated to gambling. ESPN now has its own betting service. Sports betting is eating sports alive and is not without consequences. Calls to his gambling addiction hotline have increased significantly since 2018. Apple has been secretly instigating this even before it released its sports app. This has allowed sportsbooks to create apps that make betting easier than ever before.In the article conversationGambling addiction expert Meredith Ginley writes about how gambling apps are introducing in-game push notifications to encourage risky behavior.
Even if sports apps are truly nascent sports betting ventures, they are still big business. ifIt would be the final confirmation that gambling had been accepted into mainstream American culture, a move that would bring gambling even further into the mainstream. Apple Sports is already at the top of the App Store charts despite its limited features. This could become the default, much like weather or camera apps, and could push sports betting away from the world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users with the simple tap of a touchscreen. Sports betting grew bigger than almost anyone could have imagined in 2018, and now it will grow even bigger than most could imagine.
