The Athletic alternatives

What reviewers actually said

Built only from these 120 real reviews (foreign ones translated). Superscripts jump to the quote here. Apple has no per-review links, so [ref] opens that app's reviews on the App Store.

1. [R8] The Athletic 4/5 · US Great app but crashes all the time: I like the app but I hate the fact that it often freezes when I’m in the middle of writing a comment.
2. [R43] The Athletic 1/5 · US Slow: Come on, you’re in the prime time of digital age yet The Athletic apps is slow and not updating World Cup latest scores and standings. 👎👎
3. [R15] The Athletic 3/5 · US Cannot comment: The content is good but I’m unable to comment on anything
4. [R10] The Athletic 1/5 · US Videos autoplay regardless of settings: I turned off video autoplay and am constantly having video ads auto playing. Means the app is entirely unusable when not on WiFi for those of us without unlimited data.
5. [R12] The Athletic 3/5 · US Fine: Love the content, but I should have ads in app behind a pay wall that I’ve already paid. They need to be taken out if I pay for a subscription. Or add a “no ad subscription”
6. [R28] The Athletic 2/5 · US Now with invasive advertising: They added advertising after I paid for a subscription that they said was ad free. Will they lower the price now that ads are making the experience worse? I doubt it.
7. [R30] The Athletic 3/5 · GB Too many ads: The app is perfect for football news and offers a refreshing switch up from what I was previously using (Twitter/X - filled with unwanted content). However very disappointed that despite paying for a membership there are still an awful lot of ads. At times taking up the whole screen! Close to being the perfect sport news app but slightly out of touch in that aspect.
8. [R1] The Athletic 1/5 · US Spam: Get off my phone
9. [R13] The Athletic 1/5 · US Intrusive: Constantly trying to force new notifications on me, making me have to constantly turn them off.
10. [R24] The Athletic 3/5 · US Notifications are the app’s main issue: This review is about the app notifications appears the writing and reporting. The app is fine except for notifications. 1. Comments. A user may enter comments and replies but it is impossible to find them and you aren’t notified if you have a direct tagged reply. 2. App icon badge. I frequently see numbers on the app icon but clicking on the app does not
11. [R27] The Athletic 3/5 · GB Annoying notification settings: I love The Athletic and its coverage but their last update is really annoying. You can’t seem to get rid of the red news notifications, even after scrolling through the updates. It means I have 36 notifications showing on my app screen which are really difficult to shift. Can this be looked into?
12. [R4] The Athletic 1/5 · US Biased Reporting: Includes too much liberal leaning politics into sports stories. Useful only if you follow a few big city franchises.
13. [R16] The Athletic 1/5 · US Woke BS: Used to be my go-to now it’s just woke progressive BS.
14. [R31] The Athletic 1/5 · US Reduced quality: The Athletic is meant to be a reputable source for sports journalism. Lately they have been propagating engagement bait that is fueling the fire of ignorance surrounding the rules of World Cup football. The people writing these articles should know the rules of the game, so they are either bad journalists or they are intentionally manipulating the content they are pushing for clic
15. [R2] The Athletic 4/5 · US Wimbledon: Great app but shocked there’s no Wimbledon coverage. It’s not even listened in scores. Went to check when some of the matches were and couldn’t find it. I would suggest adding tennis for the 4 major events. Otherwise great overall coverage.
16. [R33] The Athletic 3/5 · GB Why no rugby?: Great football coverage but in the UK I don’t want to read about Baseball, Cricket and American football. I want to read about Football, Rugby and Cricket. Please start thinking about expanding your coverage…
17. [R35] The Athletic 4/5 · US Good, not perfect: The NHL standings are very tight right now, but The Athletic doesn’t show the RWs or other tiebreaker stats in their standings for some reason.
18. [R3] The Athletic 3/5 · US Logging On: Tired of being asked to subscribe or sign in when I already have a subscription. May cancel because of this inconvenience. Too many other options for sports news.
19. [R6] The Athletic 3/5 · US Can’t exclude articles that are subscriber only & free article links don’t return an open article: Wish I could exclude articles that are subscriber only instead of having to click and be disappointed. Also, articles that come through in notification emails as available for free aren’t available when I click on the link. Another waste of time.
20. [R22] The Athletic 1/5 · US Terrible app: Obviously The Athletic didn’t spend a lot on software development for their App. Continues to block content telling me I am not a subscriber even though they already have my money!
21. [R34] The Athletic 1/5 · US Help Center doesn’t exist?: So I’m having a problem with the app where it won’t show any comments and I went to contact support and got an error saying that help center doesn’t exist. How does one get help?
22. [R52] ESPN 5/5 · US ESPN: Keep coming up with new updates.
23. [R55] ESPN 5/5 · US The greatness of ESPN: Dear ESPN, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The ESPN app delivers an outstanding sports experience with a clean, intuitive interface and exceptionally reliable coverage. Live scores update seamlessly, breaking news is timely and comprehensive, and the personalized features make it effortless to follow my favorite teams and leagues. The streaming quality is consistently excellent, and the app strikes
24. [R56] ESPN 3/5 · US Keep Politics Out of Sports: Pretty simple.
25. [R57] ESPN 1/5 · US R@cist commentary: When Steven a smith was allowed to say what he did with no backlash I realized espn caters to a double standard. I will be deleting services and my app.
26. [R65] Bleacher Report 2/5 · US Ads: I’ve used this app for years but recently I can’t even use it anymore because I’m not getting so many ads on it that I can’t navigate the app. It’s filled with pop-ups and anytime I try to read anything or just navigate the app it’s redirecting me to a third party site. It’s giving off the feel of an unsafe website that will lead to viruses. It’s a shame that the app has gotten to this point.
27. [R66] Bleacher Report 5/5 · US Review: This is a good app to use for Sports.
28. [R68] Bleacher Report 1/5 · US 11 FEB Update: Today’s update is straight trash. I don’t know what the developers were thinking. Then had the nerve to have the new BR icon in the sideline of the game. Focus less on the marketing and more on the actual app. Update 30 Jun they still need to update notifications and the comment section.
29. [R69] Bleacher Report 5/5 · US Goated: Been using this app for over 10 years, great way to keep up with all ur fav teams across all the diff leagues
30. [R79] MaxPreps 2/5 · US Great until subscribed: The app works good, however, a subscription to watch live games only ever takes me to NFHS when I click “Live.” What am I paying for on maxpreps if it redirects me to NFHS? Why can’t it keep the livestream on maxpreps, or let me watch on NFHS since I am subscribed to maxpreps.
31. [R80] MaxPreps 4/5 · US Very good app, could use some tweaks: Very good app! I usually do some reporting for my school, basketball. Football works too, but when it comes to baseball, soccer, etc., the scoring just doesn’t work. My second complaint isn’t all that much of a deal, but i feel like having a limited amount of team sports you can follow is a bit redundant, especially if you are “loyal”, per se, to multiple scho
32. [R81] MaxPreps 3/5 · US Not Interactive: My grandson is a junior and moved to Whitewright, TX. He’s the starting point guard and the app does not let me add him for basketball - cause the database doesn’t list his name, I guess. He is listed as an athlete in football for Whitewright. Basketball is his main sport. There is no apparent way to communicate with anyone at MaxPrep.
33. [R82] MaxPreps 1/5 · US Not good: First of all, nobody wants to create yet another log-in in this day and age. If there was ever an app crying out for “Log-in with …”, it’s this one, a high school sports app. Second, I’ve never seen an app use as much data as this one. I have auto play “off” for videos, and it’s still somehow chewing up MBs like crazy.
34. [R93] WFAA 1/5 · US BS: This app won’t even install on my phone even as an update because it has the wrong iOS! My phone is updated and is iOS 3. Your app says iOS 6. Good luck with that.
35. [R94] WFAA 5/5 · US Lorrie: I just want to Thank you for having the news so available for us!
36. [R95] WFAA 3/5 · US Interactive Radar and Weather section: Updated App on iPad July 7, 2026, disappointed. The last 2 updates, were the opposite of improvements. I reference the news and weather very often, and especially when inclement weather is expected, sometimes used to see radar in other areas of the USA, now radar is glitchy with a noticeable loss of usefulness. Disappointed.
37. [R96] WFAA 2/5 · US Radar crashes a lot: Recent updates make app crash almost every time I open radar. Two year old iPhone with newest software and plenty of memory. Deleted/Reinstalled five times. Same issue each time.
38. [R107] Yahoo Sports 1/5 · US Yahoo sports: App sucks… can’t go in scores without seeing a dating app about nude women, I’m a female that doesn’t want to see that and neither does/will my husband…will delete app because it refuses to stop ads when we want them stopped!
39. [R108] Yahoo Sports 4/5 · US Good but could be better: I like it about the same if not a bit more than TheScore. Yahoo Sports introduced an indicator for a win/lose streak for each team. Problem with this is that there’s no visual indicator for whether it’s a win streak or a lose streak. So while I know that the dodgers are on a win streak, I look at the Mets and think that they’ve done the impossible and not been a complete
40. [R109] Yahoo Sports 3/5 · US Poorly optimized for screen: The latest update reduced the usable screen area to less than a third, with large empty bars on each side, making the actual content small and difficult to read.
41. [R110] Yahoo Sports 1/5 · US Stop the score banners!: Deleting this app because I’m constantly getting live score updates on top banner of my Home Screen even when locked, for teams I don’t even follow. All notifications and haptics are turned off and they still show up.
42. [R87] MaxPreps 3/5 · US What are score boards: How are yall gonna put that our team won 60-35 because that’s what happened and then change the score two days later to tell they lost
43. [R90] MaxPreps 3/5 · US What?: So I checked my football team score against the game we played Thursday and the score was wrong. It got correct that we did win. Oh it bothered me as it said 39 to 32 which was incorrect cause they did not get 32 points. we got 35 points and they got six points. Can someone please fix the scoring system because y’all are getting it wrong
44. [R92] MaxPreps 4/5 · US Incorrect score posting: Midlothian’s record is incorrect as posted. Their record is shown as 12-0-4. Their record should be listed as 12-0-3. MaxPreps posted the Atlee score twice. Midlothian only placed Atlee once. The game that was scheduled for May 5th was canceled due to weather. The game was rescheduled for later in the schedule in a game where the score was posted as a 3-3 tie, which is
45. [R59] ESPN 3/5 · US App Crashing: I like the app, and it’s easy to use. The issue with it though is that it will randomly crash while I’m reading an article. Happens too often and I don’t experience this with my other apps. If it weren’t for this I’d give it 5 stars.
46. [R60] ESPN 1/5 · US Broken app: Every time I try and read article, or anything else, I get about five sentences in and the app tries to break itself. It will either send me to the home page, switch to some random article, or gray screen. The app has been completely unusable for the last month. I’ve had the app for multiple years and just uninstalled it.
47. [R62] ESPN 1/5 · US Can’t read stories: Over past few weeks I am not able to read stories details, get a blank screen- my iPhone and iPad.
48. [R64] ESPN 1/5 · US The worst: Downloaded this to watch Wimbledon and have found it incredibly frustrating to find the matches I want to see or navigate all the noise. Plus the amount and repetition of ads is crazy making.