theScore vs The Athletic

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. [R3] theScore 3/5 · US Was good, too many features now: Good app overall, a bit slow, feels like the jammed in as many features as possible which makes it more clunky. It also drains battery tremendously fast now after some recent updates so will be looking for a different app. Literally drained 5% of my battery in 6 minutes the other day, so absurd. I just need the score, I don’t need chat, live updates, fancy play-by-
2. [R12] theScore 3/5 · US Too much gambling info: Great app regarding scores, sports news, and all that good stuff. -2 stars because there is way much content geared towards gambling. I wish there was just a setting to toggle off all gambling related info so only useful content was shown.
3. [R75] The Athletic 3/5 · US Need a way to search by columnist: The Athletic has so many incredible writers yet, it appears there is no way to search for them (or get alerted) when they write a new piece.
4. [R81] The Athletic 3/5 · US Missing key feature: Must have the ability to add events/games to my calendar. Other sporting apps have this and it’s extremely useful.
5. [R25] theScore 2/5 · US The live is out of sync: The scorecast is slow and you get updates on what’s happening from the score before the live cast updates. It makes that feature useless. I think this app is garbage until they fix that.
6. [R82] The Athletic 2/5 · US App forces you to dig through trash to read: Extremely cluttered ui makes it difficult to actually read articles. Users must navigate not only ads but 30 second videos that do nothing but read a headline of an actual article, on sports you don’t care about Please add a way to filter out sports you don’t want to read about as well as videos
7. [R120] The Athletic 3/5 · GB Love the content, app is horrible: Often articles take long time to load and more often than not the article disappears whilst you are reading it and then takes another long time to read. This happens in many articles and multiple times per reading session. Really frustrates the user experiences
8. [R6] theScore 3/5 · US Score: Was great until a few weeks ago when the score showed nothing, blank scoreboard
9. [R46] theScore 1/5 · US Crashes: App crashes and black screen. Don’t bother replying. Your meta software is programmed to respond with general comments . Your app sucks now
10. [R79] The Athletic 1/5 · US Very glitchy app: Slow load times
11. [R10] theScore 1/5 · US terrible ads: Every time I open the app there's inappropriate ads and if I accidentally click on it, it takes me to the app store to download the app connected to the ad. I would leave zero stars if I could.
12. [R28] theScore 2/5 · US Ads: I understand Ads keep the app free, but can you limit them so they’re not so many? Too distracting!
13. [R63] 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”
14. [R92] The Athletic 5/5 · US I’d give it a zero if I could: The whole thing here was “pay for it, no advertising”. Well, no. It’s now plastered with ads. I’m paying way too much to also put up with this nonsense.
15. [R40] theScore 1/5 · US Very bad experience: I signed up specifically for the 100% First Bet Reset promotion. I placed my first wager as a 2-leg parlay, then immediately cancelled it because I only wanted a straight bet. I cancelled right away and placed the straight wager instead. When the bet was settled the promotion still showed as “in progress.” Like i still need to make a wager. I first contacted support and was
16. [R58] theScore 1/5 · US Live Activities do NOT work: The notification settings for this app are absolutely, unbelievably bad. I set all my notifications to only show me scoring updates and have live activities. Guess what - live activities never update AT ALL on my lock screen (and yes I have them enabled in iOS settings). Additionally, despite me choosing explicitly not to have notifications sent for the end of an innin
17. [R70] The Athletic 1/5 · US Unwanted notifications and no way to provide feedback: Every morning, the app pushes notifications for the “pulse newsletter” and sometimes also some big sports event, today it was “meet summer’s soccer stars”, even though I have no soccer teams/leagues flagged to follow. There are no settings to turn these notifications on/off. I only have notifications on for my teams. To make it worse, the f
18. [R73] The Athletic 1/5 · US Unwanted Notifications: I only want notifications for teams and leagues I follow. But every morning I get a notification for “The Pulse” newsletter which I cannot disable. This has been happening for months and still isn’t fixed. I’m about ready to uninstall the app.