Yahoo! Sportacular Pro Review

It's an important time of year for sports - college basketball is in the advanced stages of its tournament, the NBA season is winding down, and the MLB season is starting to ramp up. Now is the time to find yourself a good app to keep track of all the sporting-type events happening. Sportacular is one of the oldest apps for this purpose on the App Store, and since the original days of the App Store, the app has since been acquired by Yahoo, and now offers a Pro version of their app that lets you check and get alerts for games currently going on, get the latest news from the various leagues, of which there are over 20 available to track, across every major professional sport.

The push alerts are great if you're someone like me who follows a team from outside your area - I like to keep track of my San Antonio Spurs, but having an app to alert me when the games start and the latest scores allows me to keep current on how my team is doing, especially since I only get to see them when they are on national TV. You can also get alerts for individual games, so if there's a game not part of your regular alert subscriptions, you can still keep up with it if you want. As well, you can make picks on upcoming games, and there are leaderboards you can follow for the current leaders in the various leagues.

The problem with Sportacular Pro as a paid app is that pretty much the only difference between this version and the free version are the banner ads, and the banners weren't really all that intrusive in the free version, to a point where I even had trouble remembering where the ads were in the free version. So, unless the ads in the free version really drove you batty, you might want to pass on the Pro version. Also, there's no support for college baseball news and alerts - I'd love to keep track of the sport more closely, but I can't. Also, the app kind of hides non-Yahoo sources for news deep in the app's settings. Of course, when you have multiple sources set up, then you often run into duplicate stories, so it may not actually be all that bad of a thing.

Sportacular has long been my favorite app for keeping track of sports scores on iOS, especially thanks to its push alerts. The Pro version is great if you absolutely despise banner ads, but if they don't bother you in the free version, then save your money.