Thinking about the way to promote your team or a sports club? Or just looking for opportunities to make money from sports games and people’s love for it? Both these goals are achievable with the help of a mobile sports app. Here is your guide to getting started with this idea realization.
Sports Market Overview
The volume of the sports market increased by one and a half times between 2011 and 2018 and continues to grow. But despite the good predictions, the sports market has been hit hard by the coronavirus, largely due to a reasonable ban on gathering fans in huge stadiums. However, there is a silver lining – a rise in sports technology. 
Live streaming and augmented reality technologies allow fans to gain fairly good experience, and the ability to place bets allows club owners and team managers to compensate for losses at least partially. That is why it is quite a promising idea to create an app for the sports industry.
Types of Sports Apps
Before you start the process of sports mobile application development, you need to understand the sports types, choose the one that best suits your type of business and target audience, and get in touch with a high-end sports app development company.
Basically, sports apps are divided into two types.
- Branded apps. As the name suggests, these apps are designed to promote a sports club or team, stay in touch with fans and gather communities around the favorite players. As a rule, these apps are non-profitable but are used for better brand recognition.
- Aggregator apps. The apps of this type allow users to always stay updated on the news from the sports world. As a rule, these apps share real-time scores of different teams from different sports directions, notify users of the upcoming sports events, allow buying tickets and make bets inside the app. Aggregator apps are aimed at getting profits from the tickets sold, in-build ads, and user’s bets if this feature is available.
What is more, there is one more surprising type of sports app – fantasy sport. Fantasy sport application is a solution that allows users to gather teams from their favorite players and take part in virtual contests or competitions. After the game is over, each virtual player gets scores, and the team with the highest score becomes a winner. However, this is only one of the examples from the eSports industry which is growing year by year.
Also, it would be necessary to mention sports and fitness apps that are usually created to fit the personal users’ needs, for example, help them with home workouts, get in touch with fitness coaches and book a lesson online, or promote a fitness club. The latter may be mentioned as a branded sports app as well.
Sports Apps Essential Features by the Type
Despite there are a lot of sports apps you may choose from, we suggest stopping at the two main ones and analyzing their essential features.
| Branded apps | Aggregator apps |
| User profile. In the case of a branded app, it should be simple – as well as the process of registration and signing in. | User profile. The user profile in an aggregator app should have more functionality – it should store users’ private and financial information, being able to be customized and reflect a history of purchases. |
| Team members listings and descriptions. True fans would like to discover more about their favorite players. | Search by filters. Users should be able to use a lot of filters to find the team, event, or news they are interested in. |
| Upcoming events. Surely, you should invite your fans to visit an event since they are people who directly support the sports industry with their money. | News. Surely, an aggregator sports app should be a place when the latest news is shared immediately. The real-time scores tracking feature should be embedded as well. |
| News. This is an easy way to share the latest news with your fans. | Tickets. With an aggregator app, users should be able to buy tickets to attend the games, however, you should be very careful. There are still some bans for people gathering, so, most likely, you will be able to sell only a small share of free seats. |
| Real-time scores. Of course, your users want to find out the game scores immediately. Here, it is necessary to think about the technologies for fast data transfer. | Payment system integration. It would be nice to allow your users to pay for the tickets with credit/debit cards, mobile wallets, and even cryptos if your target audience uses them. |
| Push notifications. This is one more way to make your users stay close to the sports club or team and stay updated on the latest events. | |
| Social share buttons. Most users would like to discuss the game with their friends. Social media are the best places to do it, and thereby, improve your brand recognition and attracting other users to your aggregator app. |
Additional Features to Build a Sports Mobile App and Make It Engaging
How to develop a sports app and stay assured that it will be popular and demanded by your users? We suggest adding some innovative and profitable features.
- Live streaming. This is an essential feature for a branded sports app. Live streaming of the games allows users who can’t attend the real games to watch it, remotely support their favorite teams while being completely immersed in the atmosphere that is now in the real stadium. What is more, this is one more way to raise additional profits by asking for a symbolic fee to get access to the live stream.
- Augmented and virtual reality. These are engaging technologies, however, they make sports app development significantly pricier. Sports fans love the engaging experience, so it can become your competitive advantage in the post-pandemic times.
- Betting features. Basically, there are two types of sports lovers – those who love playing sports and those who love watching it. However, the latest category may also gather users who love gambling and making bets. This is a promising feature for making your sports app really profitable since more than half of the US adult population has made a sports bet at least once in life. However, don’t forget about legal compliance since each country has specific laws when it comes to sports betting.
- Multilingual support. If you want to make a sports application popular on the international market, this is the reason to add support for several languages and currencies depending on the target audience.
Conclusion
Creating your own mobile sports application is a great idea to realize. What is more, you may come up with something really unique and engaging thereby not allowing fans to feel sad about the prohibition to visit the stadium which most likely will be in force for some time.
