Grand Sumo Official App

I appreciate being able to access Granda Sumo in English, but this app has a lot of problems. The most important is that there’s an advertisement every time you watch a video, and the advertisement often freezes the app, forcing me to delete it and reload it.

A good, stable app that gives the non-premium member decent access to the basho. It’s about on par with the Japan Sumo Association website, but not significantly better. Premium membership is ridiculously overpriced, and I’m an avid sumo fan who watches every day of the top three divisions¡ bouts, but I’m still not paying nearly the price they want! That being said, there are significant limitations to the app (I can only search for one heya's rikishi, unless I cancel my favorite and make another my favorite. The search function only allows you to search for rikishi, not heyas, so that’s limited also. But it does give up to the minute results if every bout, and you can watch one video a day, keep track of each day's matches, and each rikishi's record (though there is no leaderboard on any level).

Ideally a premium sumo service would allow subscribers to watch full tournament broadcasts with English commentary (I’d be willing to pay extra for that) which this app doesn’t provide. There’s a few other problems as well. The app displays the winner of each match before you can watch the video. There should be a settings option that allows you to hide the results of matches until after you’ve finished watching. Also, the video thumbnails on the app often reveal the winner by showing a wrestler on the ground or out of the ring; obviously the video thumbnail shouldn’t be spoiling the match. Lastly, the app usually posts very short clips of only about 10-15 seconds on the day of the match and then later uploads longer clips (usually like 2 minutes) of the match a day or two later. The longer clips should be available immediately for fans who want to watch the current day’s matches. It’s still a pretty good app though. It allows you to list your favorite wrestlers and watch their catalogue of matches going back 10 years. The app looks good, is updated pretty quickly and doesn’t have problems with stability or crashing. The current subscription fee is only $4.99 so it’s a good deal for international Sumo fans who don’t have access to Japan’s NHK and AbemaTV broadcasts.