As a “sports fan” who grew up eating dinner while watching CCTV-5’s sports channel, in the internet era I generally used the sports section of the Sina portal to get the latest sports news. After smartphones gradually became widespread, platforms like Baidu Tieba, Hupu, and Dongqiudi became my go-to places for getting sports news and chatting with netizens. However, as I grew older and my life priorities changed, I gradually grew tired of spending a lot of time acquiring this kind of useless information. After Apple officially launched the Apple Sports app in 2024, I quickly discovered that it was the sports app I had always dreamed of.
What attracts me most about Apple Sports is that it keeps the focus on the game itself: what time it starts, what the score is, what happened during the game, and the final technical statistics. As for debates surrounding athletes or teams, I can just go elsewhere to read about them when I’m interested.
If you also want to give it a try, it just so happens that Apple Sports recently officially launched on the China region App Store. The app is completely free, requires iOS 18 or later, and supports Simplified Chinese. Below, let’s start by following a team you like and, step by step, set up Apple Sports as your own game dashboard.
Rich and colorful sports content
A dazzling array of sports and major competitions
When you open Apple Sports for the first time, you can first follow the guide to select your favorite teams and leagues. After entering the main interface, if you want to find another team or league, tap the menu in the upper right corner, then tap “Search.” On the team search results page, we can directly tap the “star” button to follow that team. If we need to follow a league, we need to enter that league’s detail page, then tap the “star” button in the upper right corner.
After completing the initial follows, if you want to add or remove follows later, you only need to tap the menu button in the upper right corner again, select “Edit,” and then you can sort all followed leagues and teams, unfollow them, add new follows, and so on.
I personally prefer to follow only my home team. After all, there are only one or two games a week; if I added all five major leagues, the home page would instantly be flooded with a massive number of fixtures. Only at the end of the season, when I need to watch the relegation or title races, do I temporarily add an entire league.
The events provided by Apple Sports are already quite rich. In addition to North American events such as the NBA, NFL, and MLB, the five major leagues familiar to football fans, the Champions League and Europa League, the J.League, and the Saudi Pro League are all included, and there is even F1, tennis, and the PGA Tour. However, Apple Sports still has blind spots in event coverage: the Chinese Super League, CBA, and some lower-tier tennis events are currently completely absent, so domestic fans should set their expectations accordingly.
After completing your follows, we can switch between the home page, “My Teams,” and specific leagues from the upper right menu. The home page displays all followed content in a centralized way. If you only want to see your home team, you can switch to the team view. If you temporarily want to learn about another game, use search or the sport category to find it, without having to favorite all the teams first.
Match results and technical statistics all in one place
After setting up your follows, the next step is to understand the game list. Apple Sports presents recent results, today’s games, and upcoming games separately: if you want to catch up on last night’s results in the morning, look at past games under “Yesterday”; if you want to know whether there is a game tonight, look at the “Today” section; if you want to know in advance when the games you follow start, switch to “Upcoming.” Filtering by team and league in the menu will further narrow down this list.
Tapping into a single game is where the real story behind the score lies. Depending on the sport, it provides post-game data, starting lineups, and live standings. If I wake up in the morning and see a lopsided defeat, I usually immediately check the technical statistics and match progression: was there an early red card, or did the defense collapse in the second half? Although cold data cannot replace watching a replay, for office workers who don’t have time to catch up on matches, it can quickly reconstruct and help them understand the basic flow of the game.
I really like the lineup information for football matches because it very intuitively displays the starting players in each position through a formation diagram. In addition, Apple Sports also marks key information for each player on the formation diagram, including goals, red and yellow cards, being substituted off, and so on, which can be said to be clear at a glance. Most football leagues currently support formation display, which is easier to read for fans who want to confirm the starting arrangements before kickoff than just a string of names.
If you are following knockout tournaments such as the World Cup or tennis Grand Slams, the group standings and brackets are also very useful. Take the recently added UEFA Nations League as an example: the event detail page displays the ranking of each group, including real-time information such as matches played, wins, draws, and losses, goal difference, and points. For this year’s World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Apple Sports also provides a complete bracket; after watching each match, you can follow the bracket relationships to understand the subsequent schedule, which is handier than searching for matches one by one.
Live action and event records at your fingertips
While a game is in progress, the home page displays the live score and game status. After tapping into the detail page, you can further view more real-time data. When multiple games are being played at the same time, you can also swipe left and right between the in-progress game cards, without having to go back to the home page and select again each time.
More than score changes, I care about the event records, because they let people understand the process of how the game progresses and make it convenient to catch up after being away from the phone for a while. Apple Sports provides play-by-play or game event information, but the way it is presented varies by sport or event; not all sports share the same template.
American football is a fairly clear example. Apple has added dynamic drive position displays for the NFL and college football, combining the ball’s position on the field with the game record; tennis allows point-by-point following of the match. Different sports retain their own scoring and progression characteristics, which makes them more meaningful to watch.
System features that hit the pain points directly
Besides opening the app to check scores, I also often use two system features, widgets and Live Activities, to leverage Apple Sports’ greater advantages: the former for viewing schedules, the latter for following games.
Widgets
Let’s start with the simplest widgets. The Sports widget provided by Apple can be used to view scores and schedules for followed teams or a single league. Before adding it, it is recommended to first complete the follow settings introduced above and update the app to the current version.
On the Home Screen, long-press an empty area to enter edit mode, then select “Edit” > “Add Widget,” search for Sports, choose a suitable size, and add it. If you want to put the widget in the “Today” view, first swipe right from the Home Screen, then add it in the same way.
My suggestion is to decide the position based on usage frequency. Games you watch every day can be placed on the Home Screen; for ones you only care about occasionally, put them in the “Today” view, or stack them with other widgets. The latter can be achieved by dragging widgets of the same size together, saving screen space.
If you want to display a specific league, first add the “League” widget, then long-press it and select “Edit Widget.” Tap “Select League,” find the league you want to see, and finally tap outside the widget to exit.
Live Activities
Live Activities are best suited for a situation like this: you don’t have time to watch the game continuously, but you want to know whether the score has changed.
For a single game, open the game detail page and tap the Live Activity icon to follow it. If today’s game hasn’t started yet, you can also set it up in advance and check for updates on the Lock Screen after it begins. For a home team you follow long-term, you can open the menu in the top-right corner of the app, then tap the gear icon, and enable Live Activities by team in Settings to reduce the repeated steps before each game.
If you’ve already enabled it in the app but it isn’t showing, go to iPhone’s “Settings” > “Apps” > “Sports” > “Live Activities” and check whether the “Allow Live Activities” option is enabled.
On iPhones that support the Dynamic Island, Live Activities can also use the top area to display information, and long-pressing the Dynamic Island expands a larger card. When you need more details, tap to enter the Sports app. This way you can keep using other apps while also quickly understanding what’s happening in the sports event.
If you don’t want to keep following a certain game, you can turn off the Live Activity on the game card, or swipe left on the Live Activity card on the Lock Screen to remove it. This is just an action for temporarily not wanting to watch a game; there’s no need to unfollow the entire team.
Apple Watch can also receive this kind of real-time game information. The conditions listed in Apple Sports’ official guide are that the iPhone uses iOS 18 or later, and the watch uses watchOS 11 or later. However, Apple Watch only displays Live Activities; there is currently no watch version of the Sports app.
If you mainly face a computer while at work, the score can even stay permanently in the Mac menu bar. As long as the Mac is upgraded to macOS Tahoe 26 or later and “iPhone Mirroring” is configured, and Live Activities from iPhone are allowed in System Settings, the score will automatically sync to the top-right corner of the menu bar. As long as the phone is powered on, even if the mirroring window isn’t open, the menu bar will update silently, making it very convenient to glance at while at work.
Notes
Apple Sports can already be downloaded from the China region App Store, but Apple also notes that availability and features may vary by country, region, or device.
- A major highlight of the non-China version is that the scores page can jump directly with one tap to platforms such as Apple TV, MLS Season Pass, or ESPN to watch the live stream. In the latest iOS 27.2, Apple even brought the Multiview feature, originally exclusive to Apple TV 4K and Apple Vision Pro, to iPhone, allowing up to 4 live camera angles or game feeds to be viewed side by side on the same screen when watching F1, MLS, or MLB. Yet these highly attractive ecosystem integrations basically cannot form a closed loop in the China region, which lacks the corresponding streaming rights.
- Betting odds are not available in all regions. Where supported, you can turn off the display in the app settings or choose the odds format.
- Neither the China region product introduction nor the US region official app materials list the Chinese Super League or the CBA, so the absence of these two competitions cannot be directly attributed to China region restrictions.
Final Thoughts
Today I still follow various sports events, and I still read news reports and fan discussions. It’s just that compared with the past, I’m no longer willing to spend so much time tracking games and all kinds of information. When I have time, I’ll still carefully watch a full game or read a few professional analyses; when I’m busy, I may just want to know how my home team is doing and what the result is, and after learning that I can continue with the things at hand.
That’s exactly where Apple Sports appeals to me: it doesn’t need to become a platform that handles all sports needs; being able to conveniently learn about the games I care about at any time is already enough.