ESPNcricinfo - Cricket Scores 4+

Cricinfo is comfortably the best app for staying in touch with games going on all around the world - but I’m fed up of the default option of breaking news notifications being turned back on every time there’s an app update. I don’t want push notifications, I’ve told you I don’t several times. Stop turning them back on without asking.

Cricinfo used to be the best cricket resource in the world. Over the past few years, though, the quality of the app has deteriorated considerably. It’s become so bad I’ve downloaded Cricbuzz. While that doesn’t have the same level of information that Cricinfo does, at least it works…

Here are a bunch of things I’d like to see in future updates of the Cricinfo app:

- Please fix the home screen widget. This hasn’t worked for months now. The home screen widget simply displays: “Please check internet connectivity” regardless of which match you select.

- Please fix the Apple Watch app. Again, this hasn’t worked for months now. The news seems to work ok, but the scores simply has a loading wheel that goes round and round.

- Please introduce Live Activities for iOS. It would be incredibly useful to have the current score of ongoing games on the lock screen.

- Please allow people to set their preferences to see the kind of cricket scores they’re most interested in, rather than a dump of all the first-class games that are currently ongoing. For example, I’d like to see international cricket scores — ideally England first (both men and women) — and then county cricket. I really don’t care about any of the domestic competitions or franchise cricket happening elsewhere round the world.

I like being able to understand what’s going on in the cricket and cricinfo has all the best scorecards and good journalism and news stories. However a lot could be done to make the app better:

1) when i receive a notification and I decide to press it, I do expect to be taken to the page the notification is referring to. Most of the time this isn’t the case and I have to go out and look for what the notification is talking about. This is significantly irritating and just a case of faulty coding.

2) there is a lot on ESPNcricinfo the website that isn’t on the app; this is highly disappointing. Stuff like all the past results and some of the funky stats and the like. If I have downloaded an ESPNcricinfo app but still found myself having to regularly open the ESPNcricinfo website in order to look for stuff, this means that the app is of little priority and is poorly designed. This is such a shame as there is a lot of potential and all you have to do is make the app as useful as the website is.

It’s like having a sports car that you only use in first gear.