‘MLB for VisionOS Strikes Out on Opening Day’

More sports-on-Vision-Pro news from Jason Snell:

That might still happen, but just before Opening Day the app was updated to support real, live baseball games, and all the exciting stuff is gone. Today I took it for a spin and was deeply disappointed — it’s essentially just a front end for watching games via MLB TV, and a buggy one at that.

I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available — from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.

The app also only plays back a single video at a time, even if multiple games are going on at once — despite the fact that watching multiple video streams at once is basically what VR was made for.

I watched the end of the Yankees opener against the Houston Asterisks wearing Vision Pro, and share all of Snell’s gripes about the app. It’s downright bizarre that the app has a “main” window that, if closed, quits the entire app — but that’s not the window where you watch video!

And so many little paper cuts, like the fact that the app doesn’t integrate with the system Keychain APIs, so you don’t get autofill for passwords. I’m so used to password autofill across all my devices that it felt like I was using some sort of retro device, entering my MLB.com password manually.

Glad to see MLB have a native app on Opening Day, but man, they have a long way to go before it’s actually good.

★ Thursday, 28 March 2024