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Android Live Scores

Hi everyone,

I'm the developer for Android Live Scores. I wanted to introduce myself and create a thread where everyone could give feedback (good or bad). I welcome all criticism and am very open to suggestions.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions, I appreciate all future input. I will continue to update the top post with Live Scores release updates.

We released Live Scores 2.0.0 Aug, 31, 2011 which includes:

Rebranded as Yahoo! Sportacular from Live Scores.
Facebook Connect allows you to post check-ins and game-picks on your FB wall.
Share Game Scores from the games page.
New scores navigation
Native Game Plays
LPGA, PGA Champions, PGA Nationwide, PGA Euro
Mens Tennis, Womens Tennis
Map on Game Picks
New Titlebar with Sport selector
Removed NFL Draft
Restyling
Bug fixes

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We released Live Scores 1.6.0 June, 15, 2011 which includes:

Favorites Page
Trending Teams Page
Team Pages
Bug Fixes

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We released Live Scores 1.5.3 Mar 29, 2011 which includes:

More restyling
Stats for all
Starting 5 for NBA
Rich Media Ad support - we'll be rolling this out over time. They wont take up more space, just a little more entertaining and better styled.

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We released Live Scores 1.5.2 Mar 09, 2011 which includes:

Restyling of game-details for most sports.
Minor bug fixes.

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We released Live Scores 1.5.1 Feb 10, 2011 which includes:

NASCAR Leaderboard, Standings and Schedule pages.
NASCAR Widget.
Minor bug fixes.
More NASCAR updates coming before Daytona 500 (Feb 20).

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We released Live Scores 1.5.0 Feb 7, 2011 which includes:
PGA Support
Styling changes to the scores view.
Widget updates
Some small bug fixes.

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We released Live Scores 1.4.7 Dec 16, 2010 which includes:

WIDGET
Plus styling changes - most significantly around NFL game details.
Bug fixes.

Widget is new and a bit rough around the edges so be gentle.
In the background in runs similarly to the Alerts.
From the UI you can pick favorites and then assign them to a widget.
We have both large and small widgets, the large widget lets you scroll, the small widget is just one team at a time.

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We released Live Scores 1.4.6 Nov 19, 2010 which includes:

GPS bug fix
GPS user options including OFF, WIFI Only, GPS Only, WIFI & GPS.
Completely new news page w/ user configurable news sources.
Audible alert with on/off toggle in app settings.
Added Froyo(2.2) support for App to SD feature.
Styling updates throughout the app, especially standings and news.

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We released Live Scores 1.4.5 Oct 28, 2010 which includes:

Game Check-In and Post-Check-In stats for game and league.
Sport specific alerts.
Bumped "Switch Sport" to the top of the menu.
Fix for defaulting to NFL.
Alerts should 100%

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We released Live Scores 1.4.4 Oct 7, 2010 which includes:

Game Picks (for pre-games).
Default Sport (you may select the default start sport)
Significant performance improvements.
Alert Notification changes.
 
Aaron,

I'm very interested in this. Right now, I think only Sportstap is providing system notification updates. Their support is completely non-existent and their score updates unreliable.

The biggest annoyance I have with Sportstap is that I'm set to receive notifications on start of game, score changes and end of game. I'm always receiving updates when there's been no score changes and I find that just a big annoyance.

It'd be nice to have someone implement this correctly, provide support to the community and listen to suggestions.

Right off the bat, I see one thing you did better than Sportstap. I can select which type of updates I want on a per team basis. I don't want to be notified of every score change in an NBA game, but I do in a baseball game.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when games are taking place later today.

Other than that at the moment.....maybe a way to filter some sports out of the select sports window, little jazzier interface maybe, good widget, little more customization for alerts.

I have alerts enabled, and vibrate off. What if I wanted to pick an alert tone? (I don't, but I'm sure others would).

At the moment, I'm just really hoping that alerts do get pushed to me very shortly after the actual time of the score change and that it's not hard on the battery.

How often is the app checking for score updates? Are they being pushed or pulled? If this program is heavy on the battery, maybe a setting to adjust the frequency it checks for updates?
 
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Thanks for the feedback, those are very good points.

Regarding the community support, we've felt the same way and I'm hoping this will serve as an adequate medium for communicating with live scores users. I've also created a twitter account @LiveScoresApp for anyone that would like to follow.

Customization is coming, as well as support for more sports. As many users have pointed out, the iPhone version known as Sportacular, is further along in the development process and has more features, we're trying to play catch up, but we're getting there.

Battery is a big topic. I'm a Droid X user and battery life is important to me.
Live Scores is battery conscious. You may turn alerts off at any time, when alerts are off and the app is not active, battery usage should be nearly zero. When alerts are active, currently the alerts are pulling data at 3 minute intervals. The phone is allowed to sleep between intervals and is only awake for a second so battery use is fairly low for alerts as well.
 
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Hello!

Been a big fan of the app for a while, but the thing that I really dislike is the menu system and general navigation. I'd rather see a static bottom bar than having to push menu every time I want to see something different.

I think the iPhone version has something like this, and I much prefer it.

I used to be an iPhone user and loved it, I switched to the Droid X with the idea that I should be more familiar with the day to day use of a droid and follow the common practices for our own app Live Scores. I thought I wasn't going to like my Droid X as much because I'm a big fan of nice user-friendly UIs, but once Froyo came out for Droid, I was sold - there's no going back for me, I'm a die-hard Droid fan. iPhone is definitely light to touch when compared to the Droid X and its heavy menu buttons. The iPhone has top and bottom bar buttons because of its lack of the physical buttons like Android phones. For now we're trying to follow the standard practice of using the menu button, however future releases may be different. According to Android development guides, we shouldn't rely on the fact that all future devices will have buttons, so to accommodate, we may see on-screen buttons like the iphone in the future.
 
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I actually added alerts for the Minnesota Wild. That's the only event (not soccer) that's going on right now. It's late in the 3rd period at 1-1.

Hopefully, this will be a good, quick test to see how alerts are implemented.

EDIT: Also, maybe one more option for notification. Might be nice to add an option for a notification at the end of each "break". Basically would be end of inning, football/basketball quarters, soccer half, etc. As long as you can configure it, by team, I don't see how that could hurt.

I appreciate the testing! ;)

Alerts are not 100% right now. We have a lot of users requesting alerts and we're in the middle of starting up some new servers to handle the larger user base. This should roll out over the next week and alerts should be 100% after that.

But we're always making tweaks and we try to make changes and get them out to our fans quickly, sometimes at the cost of releasing a few minor bugs too. So we ask that our users stick with us and give us feedback about their experiences so we can get those fixes out ASAP.
 
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Battery is a big topic. I'm a Droid X user and battery life is important to me.
Live Scores is battery conscious. You may turn alerts off at any time, when alerts are off and the app is not active, battery usage should be nearly zero. When alerts are active, currently the alerts are pulling data at 3 minute intervals. The phone is allowed to sleep between intervals and is only awake for a second so battery use is fairly low for alerts as well.
Droid X user here too. Glad to hear it's battery conscious. Hopefully, I won't see live scores accumulating significant partial wake lock times. Does the app still check every 3 minutes even when no games you have alerts for are currently in play? As I suggested before, if it might help on battery (or if someone wants quicker updates and doesn't care about battery) maybe that 3 minutes can be user adjusted.

Also, maybe one more option for notification. Might be nice to add an option for a notification at the end of each "break". Basically would be end of inning, football/basketball quarters, soccer half, etc. As long as you can configure it by team, I don't see how that could hurt.
 
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I cant really think of any apps that rely on "Menu" for being the primary method of navigating - it usually is just for additional options which don't appear on the typical upper or lower navigation bar. Have you ever used the app called "Touiteur"? Its a twitter client, but probably has the best navigation menus out there (IMO). I think something similar could be implement in Live Scores. I love that swiping left and right changes the windows too.

Can you explain why the iPhone version is labeled as being Yahoo! and this is not so on the Android version?

Edit: One more thing, is a widget in the works? Because thats make or break for me and why I stick with SportsTap - it has the best widget IMO.
 
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Can you explain why the iPhone version is labeled as being Yahoo! and this is not so on the Android version?
Interesting question in that Aaron apparently works for Yahoo! Is this a Yahoo! product?

One more thing, is a widget in the works? Because thats make or break for me and why I stick with SportsTap - it has the best widget IMO.
Agree, but their notifications are a mess. You could always run the Sportstap widget and Live Scores notification. Not sure how bad an effect that would have on battery though.
 
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I used to have SportsTap but since 2.2, it's been way too buggy. Ever since, I've really been pleased with with Live Scores. At one point, I had them both running simultaneously for sports updates. For instance, Broncos games and Rockies game happening at the same time. Live Scores consistently gave me better updated scoring, and times of the game were much more accurate. I work a lot with GUI in my work, and I wish Live Scores would condense the main score screens to be much smaller. They take up too much space, and is much better to see all on one screen, rather than scrolling. This, and the overall look and design, is where Sportstap wins. However, the app is supposed to give timely, accurate scoring, and so I use Live Scores.

I was just rereading an earlier post and didn't realize you could swipe from side to side for scores. I saw the red arrows by the date but was hoping this was for swiping for ALL sports, not just different dates within the SAME sport. May an option for this, as on weekends, college football, NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB playoffs, etc. would be great to swipe all the different sports.

Thanks!
 
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Droid X user here too. Glad to hear it's battery conscious. Hopefully, I won't see live scores accumulating significant partial wake lock times. Does the app still check every 3 minutes even when no games you have alerts for are currently in play? As I suggested before, if it might help on battery (or if someone wants quicker updates and doesn't care about battery) maybe that 3 minutes can be user adjusted.

Also, maybe one more option for notification. Might be nice to add an option for a notification at the end of each "break". Basically would be end of inning, football/basketball quarters, soccer half, etc. As long as you can configure it by team, I don't see how that could hurt.

We do attain many partial wake locks. We attain a partial wake lock every 3 minutes while alerts are active. If the alert system does not detect any games that you are interested in, within an hour then the alert system will automatically suspend itself and stop the 3 minute polling. So its only checking for alerts when games you are subscribed to are active.
 
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I cant really think of any apps that rely on "Menu" for being the primary method of navigating - it usually is just for additional options which don't appear on the typical upper or lower navigation bar. Have you ever used the app called "Touiteur"? Its a twitter client, but probably has the best navigation menus out there (IMO). I think something similar could be implement in Live Scores. I love that swiping left and right changes the windows too.

Can you explain why the iPhone version is labeled as being Yahoo! and this is not so on the Android version?

Edit: One more thing, is a widget in the works? Because thats make or break for me and why I stick with SportsTap - it has the best widget IMO.

A widget is definitely in the works, maybe not the next release but we've been talking about it at the office for awhile.

Both Sportacular and Live Scores started as side projects, that grew quickly. Sportacular for iPhone was only recently branded as a Yahoo product. Sportacular is further along than Live Scores. I do work for Yahoo and I'm developing Live Scores, but I cannot say yet if Live Scores will receive the Yahoo branding. If it does, it will be a good thing, because along with Yahoo's blessing comes more manpower which means more features for the users.
 
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We do attain many partial wake locks. We attain a partial wake lock every 3 minutes while alerts are active. If the alert system does not detect any games that you are interested in, within an hour then the alert system will automatically suspend itself and stop the 3 minute polling. So its only checking for alerts when games you are subscribed to are active.
With a game going on that I had notifications set for, I had 48 minutes of Live Scores partial wake lock time with 6 minutes of total uptime (since last unplugged). That seems a bit high. Never saw sportstap have much partial wake lock time. Don't know if/how it's affecting the battery, which is really what counts.

Did you see my other comment about updates at end of break intervals as well?

There never was another score in the Wild game. The game ended around 2:56pm ET. At 3:05pm I didn't receive the end of game notification, so I opened Live Scores to confirm it was set up and as soon as it opened, I received the notification. I'm guessing it was more the fact that I opened it rather than a coincidence that it came in at the exact same time I opened it.

I'll test further with the baseball games tonight.
 
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With a game going on that I had notifications set for, I had 48 minutes of Live Scores partial wake lock time with 6 minutes of total uptime (since last unplugged). That seems a bit high. Never saw sportstap have much partial wake lock time. Don't know if/how it's affecting the battery, which is really what counts.

Did you see my other comment about updates at end of break intervals as well?

There never was another score in the Wild game. The game ended around 2:56pm ET. At 3:05pm I didn't receive the end of game notification, so I opened Live Scores to confirm it was set up and as soon as it opened, I received the notification. I'm guessing it was more the fact that I opened it rather than a coincidence that it came in at the exact same time I opened it.

I'll test further with the baseball games tonight.

That's interesting about the amount of wake lock time. I will have to look into that. It could be that the lock is attained and not released until the service is terminated by the OS. If that's, its an easy fix.

Regarding getting that alert right when you opened the phone. It's likely that the server returned no data when it last checked for an alert, then when you opened the app, it tried again and found it.

End of break intervals makes sense. Right now we have the same alert options for all sports, the plan has been to build out sport-specific alerts once we get some of these high-priority items out of the way, such as alerts not running 100%.
 
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okay, first team I am following, quick feedback on the functionality.

Running this on a Droid X, set up notifications for the Anaheim Ducks game. Left the application running, exited by clicking the HOME button.

Now halfway through the game, the only notifications I have gotten are when I re-enter the application and wait for it to update.

Let me add to that, just got one update, almost 10 minutes after the goal happened.

So, not quite sure what is going on with notifications....
 
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okay, first team I am following, quick feedback on the functionality.

Running this on a Droid X, set up notifications for the Anaheim Ducks game. Left the application running, exited by clicking the HOME button.

Now halfway through the game, the only notifications I have gotten are when I re-enter the application and wait for it to update.

Let me add to that, just got one update, almost 10 minutes after the goal happened.

So, not quite sure what is going on with notifications....

I'm subscribed to the Ducks vs Red Wings game too. I'm not in the app and I'm getting alerts, currently 3 to 0, but I don't know how far behind they are because I'm not watching the live game.

When you got the alert 10 minutes after the goal, were you in the app or did it work outside of the app?

... Yep - Just looked at the log... It seems mine aren't always running on schedule... somewhere between 3 and 15 minutes... Okay its a bug - I'm on it right now.
 
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Hey Aaron,

To me, the best sports app is one that conserves battery, but has reliable game updates. When I downloaded Live scores a few weeks ago, the user interface was kinda ugly... so I switched to sportstap. What I didn't about sportstap was that it kept running in the background though... I hope my comments help. To summarize:

-Lite application, battery efficient, doesn't run in the background when not in use
-Cool UI
-Reliable game updates

Thanks for the great app, I'll be sure to check out Live Scores from time to time.
 
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Watching the Rays/Rangers game now and notifications are definitely a little hit or miss.

I received the start of game notification in mid-first, which is ok. I wasn't paying attention when it was 1-0. I did get the 1-1 notification 3-4 mins after the event.

It's now 10 minutes after the 2-1 score change and no notification. I then just went into the app and still no notification at all. I usually do exit the app via the back button, but that shouldn't matter.
EDIT: I just exited and went back into it again and got the update. I wonder if the system is closing the app on it's own and that's why I'm not always getting notifications. I also just noticed that I have Islanders updates set and when I just got the 2-1 baseball score, I got another update for the Islanders and it was 2-0 in the first, so I didn't get a start of game or 1-0 score updates. Looks like maybe the service was closed by the system?

Also, just found another little bug. I have NFL as my default sport. I exit the app, then go into it and I have the NFL scoreboard open in week 5 as it should, I then hit menu->select sport and choose MLB. When I do that, it opes on 10/8/10 scoreboard (yesterday). Should definitely open up on today's games.

One other comment. In my hockey score update it just says 2-0 Oct 9 and 1st. It should tell me the time expired or remaining, but not sure which. Hockey reports goals scored as time into period, but the game clock does tick down. I guess it would be different, by sport. Soccer would definitely be time expired since the clock counts up) in the period as well, or if it was between periods (it's not), should end end 1st. Either way, it should include the game time in some fashion along with the notification.

As you can see, I'm excited for this type of app, so please take this all constructively. I hope I can help improve your app and I'm sure others here feel the same.

EDIT 2: Score just changed to 2-2 in the baseball game. I had just recently exited the app and I got the notification about 30 seconds after the event.
 
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Watching the Rays/Rangers game now and notifications are definitely a little hit or miss.

I received the start of game notification in mid-first, which is ok. I wasn't paying attention when it was 1-0. I did get the 1-1 notification 3-4 mins after the event.

It's now 10 minutes after the 2-1 score change and no notification. I then just went into the app and still no notification at all. I usually do exit the app via the back button, but that shouldn't matter.
EDIT: I just exited and went back into it again and got the update. I wonder if the system is closing the app on it's own and that's why I'm not always getting notifications. I also just noticed that I have Islanders updates set and when I just got the 2-1 baseball score, I got another update for the Islanders and it was 2-0 in the first, so I didn't get a start of game or 1-0 score updates. Looks like maybe the service was closed by the system?

Also, just found another little bug. I have NFL as my default sport. I exit the app, then go into it and I have the NFL scoreboard open in week 5 as it should, I then hit menu->select sport and choose MLB. When I do that, it opes on 10/8/10 scoreboard (yesterday). Should definitely open up on today's games.

One other comment. In my hockey score update it just says 2-0 Oct 9 and 1st. It should tell me the time expired or remaining, but not sure which. Hockey reports goals scored as time into period, but the game clock does tick down. I guess it would be different, by sport. Soccer would definitely be time expired since the clock counts up) in the period as well, or if it was between periods (it's not), should end end 1st. Either way, it should include the game time in some fashion along with the notification.

As you can see, I'm excited for this type of app, so please take this all constructively. I hope I can help improve your app and I'm sure others here feel the same.

EDIT 2: Score just changed to 2-2 in the baseball game. I had just recently exited the app and I got the notification about 30 seconds after the event.


Thanks for all the notes, I appreciate it.

Alerts do run even if you close the app, however if you kill Live Scores with Taskiller, the alerts probably wont run anymore as Taskiller also terminates alarms and Live Scores uses the Android Alarm Manager to trigger alerts rather than a continuous background service.

You're definitely right about the time remaining for Hockey. For now many features are kind of generalized until we get some of the major features out, then we can drill down and work on some of those specifics. So for now the alert notifications look the same for all sports which kinda sucks if the period isn't really applicable to the sport such as NHL.

Again, right on about the date being off when switching to MLB, this is true for some other sports too, I've reproduced this bug myself and will be looking into it.

Thanks for helping out! I think comments/feedback here are much more beneficial to everyone as opposed to comments in the market which I can't respond to.
 
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