The Story
With the Super Bowl XLVI just around the corner now is definitively the time for a quality sports app to touchdown into the Android appshere. OnSport’s mix of news and social media features proved initially enticing but alas our high hopes were confounded by a shoddy organisational system.
The Experience
OnSport is damned by its compulsion to be all things to all people. Is it a sports news app dedicated to American Football, Basketball and IceHockey or is it a social network centred around those sports for fans to have their say on? With both strands given an equal standing in the app and fan content outweighing news, the result is a bit of a mess.
Admittedly OnSports is a well designed mess with polls and news supplemented by a classy picture library and an easy user submission system. Such is the wealth of content created on an hourly basis (sample question: Is this Kobe’s best season? Yes or No) and the lack of editing tools for said content, everything coalesces together into an almost indistinguishable mush.
The app’s news section is also sparse on detail with the first paragraph or less of each post included in the app and the rest only accessible through Browser.
That said, the more you engage with OnSport, the more you’ll get out of it. Follow a team or player through your user profile and you can tailor your newsfeed so at least the endless stream of news and polls will run according to personal preference.
Essentially, OnSports has the potential to be a really good app but right now, its scattershot approach to content is letting the side down. If a little more time and effort is invested in this plucky underdog then we reckon it really could flourish.
The Bottom Line
A promising but haphazard sports app with bags of potential.
Additional Info
Version reviewed 6.0
Requires Android 2.1 or higher
Download OnSports from the Android Market
Check out more app reviews here
-
The Comments
This is a very well written and accurate review. I think the root cause of the negative experience is the sudden surge in traffic and user activity, which threw off our balance of professional and user generated content.
To address this, we added the “News” view to every channel last night. We integrated Google News’s API, so we only show what they send us, then we send you back to the original source. Even so, it’s probably the best, purpose built sports news experience you can get.
Lastly, thanks to thoughtful reviews like this, we’re going to keep improving.
Thanks,
Aaron
CEO/Designer, OnSports -
The Comments
Thanks for the review, Robert. It looks like you’ve got our most recent update, which addresses some of the content filtering issues you were mentioning. If you are a Giants fan looking for mainstream news only for example, we can help you get to that in a few quick taps now.
What we love about Android is our agility – ability to react and push improvements and updates out quickly. So if you have suggestions for improvements we can make, we’d love to hear it – ai at onsports
@ai
CTO/Co-founder OnSports
Your review of OnSports
Please log in, register or login with either Facebook or Twitter to review this app
A promising but haphazard sports app with bags of potential
the good
- » Great design
- » Decent userbase
- » Good user profile system
the bad
- » Poor content filter
Wunderlist Task Manager
Tools
A beautifully designed app that makes task management almost sexyread more
