Olympics: Live Sports & News Reviews

Olympics has been around since at least the last Olympic Games, yet is still not user friendly. Professional interface engineers need to apply best practices with user feedback to improve the usability. Too many hoops to jump through (too many clicks to desired info) and insufficient user customization of the interface.
Why are event times in military time with no time zone provided? We can assume it’s local to the Olympic site, but how do we know? It could also be GMT. And why can’t we just select our time zone in settings and see all events at the time they occur in our own time zone? As it stands now, we have to covert military time to regular civilian time and then figure out what time zone the Olympic site is in (Japan this year) and then figure out the difference between the time in Japan and the time in our own town and then covert! Just let me set my time zone!

(Updated from 1 star to 3 stars because some problems were corrected.)
The pages load fast, but the settings still need to be improved:
(1) We need to have more than one favorite team; at least 3 favorites would be good - many of us have multi-national families, friends, and business colleagues.
(2) We need to be able to pick more than 8 favorite sports to follow, or else we need to be able to select some broader categories as well as individual events. At least 12 would help. For example, I would like to choose “Swimming / Diving” and get ALL the swimming and diving events including the synchronized swimming; “Martial Arts” and get Karate, Judo, TaeKwanDo and anything else considered a martial art; and “Cycling” and get everything that uses a bicycle.
(3) Olympics needs a landscape view for iPad and other tablets.

Olympics is not very intuitive or user friendly.
For example, if I want to find out how the men’s decathlon ended, then I cannot easily find it. There is no search function. There are pages and pages and pages of start times, and three cryptic letters: ATH. There is lots of space next to the time and these three letters to spell out which competition it actually is, but that hasn’t been done, so you’re just looking at a few hundred ATH start times, and you have to click on everyone of them, to see what it is.
You also cannot find in which sports a certain country has medaled. E.g. Germany has 10 Gold medals - but which discipline?
Extremely time consuming to figure it out with Olympics, it needs a complete overhaul.

Used in conjunction with the NBC app, this provides a pretty good way to determine what you want to watch. I love the auto update and the suppression of scores until you decide to go into the detail for an event.
There is one thing I’d like to see:
On Olympics’s schedule page, Live Now is great in that it allows you to see whatever is actually in progress, unlike the NBC app which gives a vague hint as to whether something is in progress, terminated, not yet started, etc.
But it doesn’t allow you to see what’s up coming, even events starting in the next minute or two. Turn off Live Now, and you have to scroll like crazy to the list to find out what isn’t finished yet. At least that’s very clearly marked, as is the live now status.
But what would really be nice is a button available when live now is off, to allow you to scroll instantly to currently in-progress events. Alternatively, you could have the Live Now screen show the next hour or two‘s worth of events with the note they’re not live yet, say under an Upcoming header.
All that said, this is still a really good app. Thank you!

1. Why can’t I set reminders for events I’m interested? There are so many and a lot to keep track of.
2. Why aren’t the schedule times in my time zone? They don’t even tell you this.
3. What’s the point of selecting favourites? There’s nowhere in Olympics I can see that they’re mentioned. Filtering the schedule by favourites would be useful. And also getting notifications for favourite event starts.
4. Why does the schedule default to the start of the day and not now? This is especially frustrating in the evening and takes forever to scroll down. The “live” button is of little help, because often the event I’m interested in hasn’t started yet. And then unclicking live sends you back to the top.

At setup of this version (Tokyo 2020), I disallowed all the cookies and phone access it wanted because there’s no sense in it. I don’t want messages and notifications, so I shouldn’t be missing out on any of the basic functionality of Olympics .

With that said:

App is a bit clunky, not easily navigable, doesn’t auto-update and can’t really update feeds & medal count without closing Olympics and reopening. The basic “refresh” gesture (swiping down) that exists in just about any app with a feed is completely absent here. It would also be nice to to be able to set multiple countries as “favorite” as in years past.

First, I am on a 12.9” iPad Pro and am unable to use Olympics in Landscape mode. It is very awkward trying to hold this in portrait mode.

Second, I keep getting “Oops! something went wrong” errors. These happen whenever I try to access content under “Featured” or “Related.” I attempted to view an air pistol shooting video that was 22 hours old and I got that error. I then tried to find the skeet shooting finals which I was sure would have a very short video, but was unable to locate anything.

The videos I did find I kept getting the error message “oops! Something went wrong.” No one who developed Olympics has seriously sat down with it and attempted to use it to access the this app. I am wondering if anyone on the development team even knows or cares about the this app. I wouldn’t think so based on Olympics. It is not user-friendly.

I will add that I have plenty of free space on this iPad. I am also running a current version of iOS. I also allowed cookies to be enabled. I did not register for an Olympic ID as I figured Olympics would work fine without it.

Great app. Would like to make a suggestion for the Schedule tab. Is it possible to enable freezing of the date at the top so that when scrolling down, the date can still be seen?

At the moment, the dates are lost when scrolling down. Thanks!

First of all, there is no contact option in Olympics if you have a technical issue with Olympics . And when you try to use the “other” category to send a message, it does not allow you to complete the process. You can only get as far as “checking” your message, but there is no “send” or similar option.

Second of all, I wanted to use Olympics to get notifications to view event but there seems to be no way to do this. There’s a “schedule” page but it also shows results. Given that I’m far from Japan and will be watching most events many hours after they actually take place, I don’t want the results in advance!

I used Olympics during the Tokyo this app and it worked great! Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the current Paralympics…. Olympics barely functions even though it acts as though it has all of the same capabilities from the this app that I got very used to using, so it is not user error. For example, the schedule tab literally has nothing on it. Also, the medalist tab doesn’t allow you to see what event each individual won their medal in. Looking forward to it being fixed!!

Olympics was great for London 2012, and so-so for Rio 2016, it was a dumpster fire for Tokyo 2020, and only showing signs of getting worse It’s sluggish on good days, and useless pretty often. The interface itself is very unintuitive, and lacks a lot of search features and sort/filter features that it used to have. The medal counts are always inaccurate, even though the individual medals are relatively up-to-date. The amount of data mined from me as a user nowhere near equates to the lackluster performance I get from this junk app...so it’s gone again...and likely not coming back...

Currently watching Beijing 2022 Winter Games. Very disappointed in Olympics. Not user friendly, First page app opens and immediately gives you an event result! I don’t want to see the final results on an app before I can watch the event for myself. The medal count listing also hard to navigate, athlete names are grouped together by country thenI believe alphabetically. Don’t see an option by country, by event, by athlete. Soon as I finish my review here, I am deleting Olympics. Needs major improvements before the next Summer this app IF NBC has them. Maybe time to move to ABC or CBS?

I really liked Olympics for the 2020 summer games. It was really neat to have both the Olympic information and the Paralympic information in one app. I kept it on my phone for the winter games since they’re so close together this time around. Great information for the Olympic Games: the schedule, results, medal count, rules, articles, etc. The only info I can find regarding the Paralympics is the occasional article. I looked for an alternative app. My thought was maybe there’s a separate one fully devoted to the Paralympics; I was wrong. It’s disappointing.

Try to figure out if the times are local to the user. Why apps can’t display the time zone next to times to make it clear. Adding results to completed events would help.

But worse is the medals tab is out of date as that tab shows me the a country has zero medals at all, while the home table snippet on medal count shows the country has 5. So the medals table may not be even be update live. Ugh. IOC - who not to get to write software.

And of course where one expects links there are none. So when you see a medal in a table you expect to click on the line for the entry and be taken to the summary of the finals, etc. But there is a massive lack of basic links in the data to the details- it’s too much work to try and work your way through.

The this app seem to be determined to be irrelevant.

There appears to be a bug in the Schedule - it doesn’t let you change the date past the current day. When you try to change the date (to tomorrow for example), the save button doesn’t work….. :(

It would also be awesome to be able to favorite events so that you can check them later without having to browse through the whole schedule again.

I literally just wanted to find out who from Chine received gold medals, and I can’t even access that from medal count by tapping on country. Finding the sport section describes the sport, which is useless for most, and has no links to any events in the sport. Trying just to find standings of 3X3 basketball tournament doesn’t exist. This is a pretty bad app that’s quite unintuitive. I give 2 stars as opposed to one because there’s some random info that’s OK. But this is not a good app.

I mainly downloaded Olympics with one hope in mind... I’d be able see a leaderboard of medals won by country. Instead you primarily show medals by event. Then you can see medals by country, but only by individual countries. Why would you not do something as simple as showing a leaderboard by country and which country has won the most medals. Then allow people to drill down into a country to see what events the medals were awarded. Seems like the most logical and obvious approach. The Olympic Games are a competition between countries after all.

Overall I like Olympics , the news is nice and schedule helpful. I wish Olympics had the medal count by the flag and then you opened for the details. It was an easy way to look for a change or to see what different countries were getting when you don’t have the time to open every country individually

Have been loving the this app, though watching in Hawaii, everything is over by the time we get it. I end up watching a lot of double coverage, it’s in reruns when we get it. Love the curling and biathlon , speed skating, short track , well everything, have loved seeing the respect between participants, it’s heartwarming. Real sportsmanship!

I was surprised to find that the official app (is this even official?) wasn’t streaming anything live at all! I don’t see how this is even remotely beneficial.
Sure, it will take you to a website to watch some things but the website doesn’t even work.
I can’t watch them live at the moment because I am traveling and I thought this would be a good place to watch instead of on TV, how wrong I was.
I personally found Olympics extremely underwhelming and disappointing. Don’t waste your time on it.

I LOVED THE OPENING CEREMONY....
Except ...PLEASE Don’t Ruin the wonderful uplifting, encouraging Spirit of humanity with On-Going Running Verbal commentaries of Social Ills, Political Differences & Problems. For a few moments: let us be Inspired, let us revel in our dreams, let us enjoy the creations of ourselves and others . We have the Constant Streaming Of Negative Realities All Day Long!!! Give us a Break —-PLEASE So that we can Raise our Sights !!!

If you ever wanted to keep up on the Olympic standings you came to the right place. This apps live updates on standings is like no other. Keeping track of your favorite athletes is effortless with Olympics. Highly recommend to anyone.

The format of the Schedule tab makes it hard to read. The Medals tab is virtually worthless without medals per country comparison. The Watch tab offers pretty much nothing more than direction to download some other app. The News tab is good enough. And More offers some settings access and more instructions to download other apps. Not a lot of value offered in Olympics.

I'm sure the coding is sound but the ux design on Olympics is astonishingly bad. Bad enough that I actually had to write a review. Y'all should be ashamed of yourselves.

Olympics makes it hard to follow who won metals. You have to really search to see which country and especially which athlete won. I miss the metal race line out also. I don’t really want to see how many metals have been given out in total so far but who won them. Also why can’t the by country line up show the number and type of metal next to the names on the first page? Olympics is not exactly what I was hoping for and is not very convient or easy to use.

It’s bad enough you can only follow three countries. Then you go to the medals, and no screen shows a ranking of top medal winners. You just see your three favorites and then a laundry list of countries. Worse still, the medals are not even totaled, you have to search for the country and then add up the medals. That’s easy for a country that has only won a fee medals, not so easy for Norway or Germany. I just I use Olympics on my phone, so it may be better on a computer or tablet. But using it on my I-phone is frustrating at best.

Please consider changing this page. In 2014 this page had a list of all the countries, how many medals and which ones they won in order by total won. You could click on the country you wanted and it showed you what sport they were won in and what athlete won it. Looking at the sport tab they will all have 1 g 1 s 1 b, I find this useless. I like to compare all the countries together. Just a suggestion!!!!

Olympics could really use a couple of improvements. First, it’s more useful to get a total of medals of ALL countries, ranked be most medals won. I can tell how many medals USA has won, but would like to see how that compares to all countries. Second, I can tell who won a medal in a certain event, BUT, if I want to see how a favorite athlete did who didn’t win, it’s difficult-not impossible-to locate that information.

I just love watching the this app. I am in awe of all the athletes. I wish it was on more during the day, thats my only complaint. Im having chemo so I have time during the day to watch it. I also love to see and hear the athletes stories.
Thank you

Instead of showing medals by support the first page should be medals by country (total medal count) don't make us look for a specific country. Then have a section that says sports and we can see the winners for each sport and their medal count. Thank you

With live the next morning and not have to wait till the next day

Would be nice if Olympics told me the schedule of events to be broadcast, all it can accurately tell you is what is on right at that moment. The page for medal winners is a joke, you can barely tell the difference between gold and bronze. This is the least user friendly app I’ve downloaded in awhile. You’ve got two years before the next this app, do yourself a favor and start over. Plenty of time to improve!