ESPN

About

ESPN is a single player sport game. It received negative reviews from players.

"ESPN" is a sports game that offers live sports viewing, scores, news, and alerts. However, the game is poorly optimized, filled with bugs, and has excessive advertisements. On the bright side, it contains plenty of humor. Overall, it provides essential sports information but falls short in terms of user experience.

Genres & Tags

Sport

Play Modes

Single-Player

+21

Skip User Reviews

31%

Audience ScoreBased on 10,000 reviews

story10 positive mentions

monetization837 negative mentions

Great for checking scores and following favorite teams.
Offers a wide range of sports content and updates.
User-friendly interface for navigating scores and articles.

Constant buffering and loading issues, making it difficult to watch live content.
Frequent ads before videos, often longer than the actual content.
Requires a TV provider login for many live events, despite having an ESPN+ subscription.

monetization
849 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
1%
99%
The monetization strategy of the app has drawn significant criticism from users, who express frustration over the overwhelming number of ads, often longer than the content they wish to view. Many users feel that even with a paid ESPN+ subscription, they are still subjected to lengthy, unskippable ads before every video, which detracts from the overall experience and makes the app feel more like an advertising platform than a sports content provider. The constant interruptions and poor video playback further exacerbate the dissatisfaction, leading many to question the value of the subscription.
- “I assumed as a paying customer, there would be no ads.”
- “I had ESPN+ for a while now, in the beginning there were no ads before clips.”
- “We're tuning in for informed, expert opinions on sports, not ads for insurance or hard-on pills!”
- “You pay for the service just to show you ads.”
- “The paid service is useless for most users, but paid or not, 15 to 30 second repetitive ads for 1 minute average videos is insulting.”
- “I pay for ESPN+ and still have ads plastered across the screen while full screening a video.”
stability
584 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
1%
99%
The stability of the ESPN app is widely criticized, with users reporting frequent freezing, crashing, and lagging issues across various devices. Many experience interruptions during video playback, especially during commercial breaks, and the app often fails to load content or respond to user inputs. Overall, the app is described as extremely buggy and unreliable, leading to significant frustration among users.
- “No bugs, no glitches, no problems streaming.”
- “The app looks and runs great.”
- “The app constantly freezes and crashes while trying to use the watch feature.”
- “Every single time I try to watch something on ESPN, the app crashes, video freezes while audio continues, or the video is such low quality that you literally cannot tell what is happening on the screen.”
- “This app has become unusable with all of the bugs and glitches.”
story
159 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
6%
90%
4%
Users express significant frustration with the app's story delivery system, citing frequent issues with notifications that fail to link to the intended articles, leading instead to the homepage or unrelated stories. Many report that stories often do not load at all, resulting in endless loading screens or incomplete articles that require a subscription to read fully. Overall, the experience is marred by technical glitches and a lack of accessibility to the content users are interested in, making it difficult to engage with the stories effectively.
- “Time to time, I receive a notification about a story that sounds interesting.”
- “I like the notification updates, but when I click on one to read the story it gets stuck on loading.”
- “Being able to get custom alerts is cool but every time I actually open one of the alerts it takes me to a general news page instead of the specific story I was interested in.”
- “I often find it aggravating when I am reading a story, minimize the app or close my phone to read it later, only to open it up again and be back on the front page.”
- “Every time I click on one of my notifications to launch a news story in the app, it just sits there and loads forever.”
- “You get a notification about a story, you click on that notification, and it goes to some other story, plus you can't even find that story.”
optimization
94 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
7%
40%
53%
The optimization of the app has received overwhelmingly negative feedback, with users reporting frequent bugs, slow performance, and high battery consumption. Many have experienced issues such as stuttering streams, lag, and a clunky user interface, leading to frustration and disappointment, especially during live events. Despite some updates improving performance slightly, the overall consensus is that the app remains poorly optimized across various devices and platforms.
- “The app itself is good and runs smoothly most of the time (although I wish it wouldn't scroll back to the top of the page randomly).”
- “Update: the app is now exhibiting an acceptable level of performance.”
- “Hopefully there can be more optimization going forward to make this app a lot more friendly and functional.”
- “The most poorly optimized, slow, glitchy, and non-user-friendly app I have ever used.”
- “This is by far the most poorly optimized streaming application.”
- “The app is simply not optimized well at all.”
music
24 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
13%
74%
13%
Users express significant frustration with the ESPN app's music handling, noting that it frequently interrupts or pauses their music and podcasts without warning, even when no audio is actively playing from the app. Many find this behavior particularly annoying when trying to check scores or browse content, as it disrupts their listening experience. Additionally, the app's audio notifications and ads are seen as intrusive, detracting from the overall usability for those who enjoy listening to music while using the app.
- “Espn is to sports as MTV is to music.”
- “It'll play the ESPN music to alert me of a score, of all the teams I follow in every sport! If you're into sports like myself, this is definitely the app to have.”
- “Very annoying when you're just trying to check scores while listening to music.”
- “The videos play automatically and over my music.”
- “Tired of my music pausing the second I open the app; it always needs to be closed and restarted upon opening and is extremely unorganized.”
- “Takes over your sound on the phone when you are just looking up a score and cuts your music off.”
humor
20 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The humor in the reviews primarily revolves around the frustrations and absurdities of using the ESPN app, with users finding irony in its poor functionality and the juxtaposition of sports commentary with comedic elements. Many comments highlight the app's shortcomings in a lighthearted manner, suggesting that while the app is disappointing, the situation itself is amusing. Overall, the humor serves as a coping mechanism for users dealing with the app's issues, blending sarcasm with genuine appreciation for the entertaining aspects of sports programming.
- “Love all the ESPN games but especially the documentaries, 30 on 30 and the zaniness and humor that gets sprinkled in to counterbalance the worship of athletes and remind us that it's all still just a game.”
- “Hilariously poor design, what are you doing ESPN.”
- “This app is so terrible, it's funny.”
graphics
19 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
16%
68%
16%
Overall, user reviews present a mixed picture of the graphics in the app, with some praising the aesthetics and design, while others criticize frequent glitches, outdated visuals, and poor functionality. Many users express frustration over the lack of reliable streaming and the ineffectiveness of the graphical elements in enhancing their experience. Despite some positive remarks about the graphics during gameplay, the overall user interface is deemed problematic and in need of significant improvement.
- “Great graphics.”
- “Great description of the plays as they happen + the graphics of how the ball is moving.”
- “Excellent fonts + graphics!”
- “The aesthetics are boring.”
- “The download feature seems to be there for aesthetics and the menus are a disaster.”
- “Recently the app regularly has graphical glitches where much of the screen goes black, particularly when on tables and game summaries.”
grinding
3 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Users find the grinding aspect of the app tedious, particularly noting that exiting the app causes a loss of progress and that navigating back to live content is cumbersome, requiring multiple steps and time-consuming increments. The minimal controls further contribute to a frustrating user experience.
- “Loses progress if you exit the app on your phone; controls are the absolute bare minimum, and chromecasting is tedious to say the least.”
- “You have to back all the way out of submenus, which is tedious.”
- “When I returned to begin watching hockey again, they were three minutes into the intermission, and it is so tedious to get back to live, in 10-second increments.”
emotional
3 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The emotional aspect of the user experience is heavily negative, characterized by frustration and annoyance due to constant buffering, lagged video and audio synchronization issues, and erratic app behavior that disrupts viewing. Users express dissatisfaction with the app's performance, which detracts from their overall enjoyment and engagement.
gameplay
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The gameplay experience is hindered by a broken password reset mechanic, and there are concerns that the developers are prioritizing iOS over Android, suggesting a need for more balanced attention to both platforms.
- “The password reset mechanic is broken.”
- “Maybe they should focus on the mechanics for Android as well instead of only paying attention to iOS.”