Apple Sports, Updated for Football Season, Will Soon Support Live Activities

Apple Newsroom:

With iOS 18 and watchOS 11, the Apple Sports app will offer Live Activities for all teams and leagues available in the app for the first time ever, delivering live scores and play-by-play at a quick glance to a user’s iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens.

Coming in an app update later this year, Apple Sports will also introduce a new drop-down navigation for the main scorecard views, making it even faster to switch between My Leagues, My Teams, and users’ feeds for favorited leagues. A new enhanced search makes it easier to view matches for leagues fans do not currently follow.

Does anyone understand why it requires iOS 18 for Live Activities? Perhaps it’s just a subtle nudge to get people to upgrade their device OS?

Also: Interesting but unsurprising to me that Apple Sports will support Live Activities on WatchOS, but won’t offer a WatchOS app. I think this is the way most — or at least many — apps should support WatchOS going forward. It’s just never been a great platform for “apps”. It’s a great platform for glanceable information, though.

Update: Via email, DF reader Deep Desai explains the iOS 18 requirement:

This is definitely because broadcast push notifications require iOS 18 — this lets you create a channel on APNS which devices can subscribe to. It’s pub/sub instead of collecting individual push tokens from devices and sending them each a notification.

★ Tuesday, 3 September 2024