You can configure your phone to send push notifications for things you actually care about using the apps listed below. It can be a new story from a website you love or an update from your friend’s blog. You can even follow breaking news stories around the world and stay updated with in-game and final scores for a variety of sports games (most of them US-centric). How, you ask? Read on to find out.
1. Follow Website Updates With Broadcast
App.net Broadcast is a simple app for Android and iPhone that sends you push notifications from people/publications you choose to follow. Create a free account and start following channels. You can even make a channel of your own for free. The app lists how often a channel sends out notifications so you’ll know if you’re going to be bombarded by it beforehand. A lot of tech related websites that you already read are up there – The New Yorker:Elements, TUAW, Smashing Magazine, Engadget and a lot more. Using the News tag you can browse channels that will update you with the breaking news stories via push notifications. There are some sports blogs to follow as well but they don’t send out score updates.
2. IFTTT Push Notifications
Now that IFTTT has an app for both Android and iOS you can make use of the notifications channels to get updates from feeds and sports teams.
A. Sports Team Updates
Once you’ve activated the ESPN and iOS/Android notifications channel, you can turn on a variety of sports related recipes. ESPN’s mobile apps are great but if you just want notifications for in-game and final scores whenever your favorite team is playing, without having to fiddle around with an app, try some of the recipes listed below. For iOS:
For Android:
B. Blog Notifications
If a website you want to follow religiously isn’t available in the Broadcast app, you can create a notification system using the RSS feed. It’s easy to do so and we’ve already written about how to create a recipe with IFTTT. Step 1: Go to Create Recipe, click This to set a trigger. From the options choose Feed as trigger channel. Step 2: Choose New feed item as a trigger, paste in the website’s feed URL and click Create trigger. Step 3: Now click That to add an action. Choose Android notifications or iOS notifications depending on your phone. Choose Send a notification at the next step. Step 4: Give the recipe a name, on the last step and you’re done. You’ll be notified of a new entry from the URL on your phone.
3. Using Dedicated Sports Apps
A. ESPN SportsCenter
This is probably the most famous app for sports updates (iOS, Android) and it has a pretty neat notification system built in. Some people think the default system is too annoying so don’t forget to customize it to your taste.
B. Live Football Scores
Live Football Scores is a single minded app for iPhone that gives you live updates to any football match. It’s easy to configure push notifications for games/teams you want to follow and it will alert you when either team scores.
C. Cricket Scores
ESPNcricinfo (iOS, Android), is just like ESPN’s SportsCenter app but focused on the game of Cricket. You get push notifications for wickets, wins, player milestones etc.
D. Yahoo Sports
Yahoo Sports app behaves just like the apps listed above but it looks beautiful, and will send you prompt notifications for your favorite teams. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
