Apple Made a Sports App That Does Almost Nothing. It's Incredible | Hacker News Reader

Apple Made a Sports App That Does Almost Nothing. It's Incredible

slate.com

22 pointsForHackernews15 comments

Wow, this is perfect. I've never found a sports app that was better than going to google.com and typing a team name. This is finally it. All I want to know, when it's getting about 4pm and my eyes start to glaze over: is there a game tonight?

This was on show hn years ago and it’s still my main sports source https://plaintextsports.com/

I like it, too US centric however, not even Champions League

It is on there. The Champions League ended almost two weeks ago. Premier League and Europa League too. (And the World Cup.)

https://plaintextsports.com/champions-league/

https://plaintextsports.com/premier-league/

https://plaintextsports.com/europa-league/

https://plaintextsports.com/world-cup/

Wow that's snappy

I want the opposite: a news app where i can completely remove all sports and celebrity trash from being mentioned, referred to, or in any way appearing to exist.

Hey look, the guy who calls it Sports Ball. Everyone loves that guy.

Am I seeing the same app as the author? I pull up the Stanley Cup stats and right there in the middle of the page are the betting lines for game 5, odds provided by DraftKings.

No advertising? Could have fooled me.

I think a lot of their apps seem to be "placeholders" for some more comprehensive app someone else will make.

Maybe it is just a ploy to get people to find a replacement app in the app store, and get apple 30%.

or maybe "you're not the target market"... more complete apps are more complicated and might not be apple-like enough to create. Apple aligns more with simple than pro-user.

I wonder, does every apple user eventually become sophisticated enough to be "not the target market"??

sigh.

granted, I think the intended or unintended effect of being stripped down creates a lot of unexpected "perfect apps".

See Michael Tsai's (I think?) professed love for TextEdit

or how pretty much every celebrity/creative with an iPhone posts letters to their fans/followers on Notes app screenshots

I've also given some thoughts to why Microsoft ships (shipped?) for decades stuff like notepad instead of some advanced text editor. My hunch was that as a platform provider you don't want to occupy the ground that should be left to third party developers- you need them to fill your platform with applications. So you provide the absolute basic and let others compete to produce the advanced apps.

I think at some point apple prevents app store developers from "duplicating functionality" or something like that.

Woah, a return to old glory form? Simply good is great.

give Apple some time; they'll add ads and otherwise enshitify the app

It has ads already — for its own sports broadcasts on Apple TV+.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com