MLS: The Official App

As an MLS fan, I’m very happy this app exists. Really wanted to like the new interface, but there are basic app functions that either work poorly or don’t work at all. First, the “Feedback” icon under user profile currently does nothing. Like, if you touch the image, it “clicks” from a haptics perspective, but that’s all. No new screen, no drop down menu, not even an “oops” error message. Just straight up nothing. Second, the “follow players” function is organized alphabetically by player FIRST NAME. While on the surface this might not seem problematic, I quickly discovered that it is seriously unhelpful. As a relatively engaged MLS consumer with a team that I watch and support weekly, I can confidently say I don’t know that I could even tell you the first names of the players on my own favorite team beyond maybe the starting eleven. The list also does not take diacritical marks into account, listing the same player twice because of this and listing other players out of alphabetical order entirely since their names start with letters that include diacritical marks. Given the amount of resources—financial and otherwise—being invested into MLS, I am disappointed and, frankly, embarrassed at the MLS app’s current quality. DO BETTER.

As a blind user of sports apps, this is not my favorite. It is workable but the access could be better. It appears many of the things you click on are more image based and it is not clear if there is an accessible button or link there or not without just blindly trying and hoping it works. I would also ask that the cap on alerts be lifted. You cannot select updates about the start and end of all games for all teams, because when you choose a team as a topic, the app immediately assigns game start/finish, team news and team goals scored as a package of 3 alerts. So you have to go in and remove two of those three alerts to get down to one, so you can then add more teams. At minimum, I'd like to be able to get a game start/end status for each team and team news alerts. As currently designed, I have game start/'finish for each team, then news, lineups and goals scored at the league wide level.

The content is great, but the app itself has some issues. My first complaint is that the navigation is less intuitive than past designs. I’d prefer to open into a feed of headlines and then navigate to highlights or team headlines. Instead all three feeds are crammed into the home page. My second complaint is worse although it doesn’t sound like many other people experience this: the audio doesn’t play through my phone’s speakers. Headphones or external speakers are fine. All of my other apps are fine. I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out why this app misbehaves but I can’t figure it out. I’d give it four stars if the audio bug was fixed and the design was tweaked a bit. I’d give it five if there was some search capability on the news feed.