Just a few weeks ago the ongoing Canadian sports app battleground continued to heat up, when theScore announced a major update to its app for iPhone and iPad, and launched its 35-person newsroom in downtown Toronto.
Evidently it had iOS7 plans up its sleeves the whole time. Today theScore unveiled its fully optimized iOS 7 experience for its iPhone and iPad app “to deliver even faster news, scores and stats along with a stylish new design.”
theScore has been on a tear lately too- the new update helped propel the app past long-time nemesis TSN in the Canadian App Store for free sports app. It showed success in the US App Store as well, reaching #5, ahead of major players CBS, Bleacher Report, Yahoo and others. There it rose as high as #68 for overall free apps in the US. Not too shabby.
“theScore has taken full advantage of the power of iOS 7 to give sports fans a stunning visual experience and instantaneous access to all the news and scores they care about,” said theScore’s John Levy “iOS 7 truly unleashes the full potential of the theScore to deliver the ultimate, personalized mobile sports experience.”
Users with devices running iOS 7 will benefit from a new user interface, adopting the eye-catching layers, animations and translucency of Apple’s most powerful mobile operating system ever. theScore also utilizes iOS 7’s powerful multitasking capabilities to deliver sports content faster than before.
theScore is available on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices and its mobile platforms are used by an average of 4.5 million users a month. The major update, being the second in less than a month, “follows the transformation of its news offering to provide a truly mobile-first, comprehensive, curated real-time experience for sports fans.” News sections across all leagues were revamped by theScore’s mobile team to deliver up-to-the-minute content, presented in “snackable bites” delivered by theScore’s in-house Content Team.
The “battleground” as I’ve been calling it has been fierce in Canada, especially because Canadian sports app users, particularly hockey-lovers, have very good retention rates. These are the kind of apps that NHL freaks check on a nightly basis, and theScore has evidently invested big into its new “news in bite-sized chunks” mentality.
It looks like the investment is already paying dividends. theScore’s James Bigg said the company had an “unbelievable month” for downloads and users – particularly since its last update, and with NFL starting-up again.
Because iOS 7 learns what time of day users are most active on certain apps, it is able to predict when they want access to certain content. This allows theScore to be updated in the background, so content has already loaded by the time a user opens it.
This, coupled with the increased speed of the A7 chip in Apple’s new iPhone 5S device, can enable theScore to deliver “the fastest mobile sports content possible, with users also able to easily share news articles using Airdrop.”