Varsity Network

The layout of the app is clean, straightforward, and accessible. I’ve never ran into an issue of a stream listed but not working. There are, unfortunately, a lot of universities whose games you simply cannot listen to but if you don’t have access to ESPN plus or on the go you can access most of the big games and you can do it for free which is always a bonus. The main issue with the app is that even when you’re not using it it’s an absolute battery drain. With this app streaming a game a brand new iPhone should not go from 100% battery to 30% battery in the course of three hours is the only thing on the phone is a stream from this app playing in the background while the phone is locked. Even when the app is not in use and closed it still drain the battery so when I know I’m not going to be using it for an extended period of time I simply have to uninstall it. There’s no reason why an app, that otherwise works phenomenally, that only offers radio streams for college games should take so much battery. Something is clearly not working right on the back end.

While trying to listen to a game this evening, I got the dreaded “white screen” after trying to connect to my requested stream. There is no graceful recovery from this - you must kill and restart the app. I tried many, many times to no avail. After the game was over, I decided to try to listen to the post-game content and again got the white screen. I then decided to see if I could connect to the opponent’s stream, which I could do. After connecting, I found that I could then select my team’s stream, which worked great. Based on this, I suspect that there is a missing ad or a malformed address to an existing ad which is causing the white screen. I did submit a report during the game through the app, but since this has been reported many times in the past, I suspect that the support folks are not paying any attention to the reports, or cannot debug the issue. My hope is that they will see this review and use it as a starting point to debug this problem, and/or test to make sure that the ads actually exist. If not, hopefully this workaround continues to work. Good luck everyone!

Overall, I love this app. I love all the college sports offerings on the app, and I hope that never changes. My biggest beef lately is that the audio stops when I lock the screen. I feel like this wasn't an issue in the past, but it's plaguing me now. Perhaps there's a setting I'm missing somewhere, but I can't find it. I would love to see a fix for this because why would it matter if the screen is locked if I'm just streaming audio? One other much more ambiguous gripe I have is related to the fact that I'm blind and there a couple of areas that are herky jerky to use with VoiceOver. I hesitate to call the "your feed" screen inaccessible, but I haven't been able to get a lot of mileage out of it yet. Like I haven't been able to name any college teams that I'd like to get notifications for? It seems like I should be able to though? That said, I've been able to listen to everything I've wanted to, when I want to, so ... I'm really not too worried about this second issue very much. Anyway, like I said, this is a good app. There's really only one feature that really bothers me. In general, I would say, keep up the good work.