The best NBA apps and basketball apps for Android
There are a ton of ways to interact with the sport of basketball. Most of us watch it on TV or listen on the radio. Social media and the internet make it easier than ever to see scores and the latest trade rumors. It’s even easier than ever to interact with other fans (or trash talk them, as the case may be). There are a ton of basketball apps out there and the selection is truly daunting. We think we can help. Here are the best NBA apps and basketball apps for Android!
There are a selection of individual NBA team apps such as the official Cleveland Cavaliers app. However, those apps are usually pretty weak and you’d be better served following the team on social media or using a larger sports news source like theScore, ESPN, or Yahoo Sports.
The best NBA apps and basketball apps for Android
The Athletic
Price: Free / $9.99 per month / $60 per year
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
The Athletic is an old-school idea with a modern twist. It covers various sports, including the NBA and college basketball. However, there are no ads or any other distractions. The Athletic uses a pay-wall (with a free trial). Thus, it’s kind of like subscribing to the old newspaper again. You pay a monthly rate (or a yearly one), and you get unfettered access to an app full of writers who don’t have to write with advertisers in mind. It’s a unique idea and something a little different. Their coverage is decent, but it is still a young company. It’s still one of the great NBA apps.
ESPN is a giant name in sports and one of the better basketball apps. The main attraction here is news, scores, stats, and updates. You can find them for college basketball, the NBA, the Olympics, the WNBA, and various other organizations. Additionally, ESPN has one of the better fantasy basketball platforms. Those with TV subscriptions can use WatchESPN (with their cable provider login) to watch live sporting events on their game systems, tablets, and mobile devices. Finally, ESPN+ is a standalone streaming service with a bunch of sports, including some basketball. Between the news, the ties into your existing cable subscription, and the standalone streaming app, it’s hard to not put ESPN on a list like this.
The official NBA app is actually pretty decent. The normal NBA app includes scores, news, schedules, updates, trades, rumors, playoff brackets, and more. Since the writers work directly for the league, you can often get news here before it hits anywhere else. The UI is decent and you can define favorite teams to get more targeted news at stuff you care about. This app also houses the NBA’s official streaming service. It’s a bit expensive but includes a ton of stuff, including games from previous seasons. You can go with a single-team pass, the full league, and a commercial-free version. There is also a $9.99 per month radio version if you just want to listen.
Price: Free / $3.99 per month / $24.99 per year
Reddit is an excellent app for basketball fans. The service has a bunch of subreddits for basketball, including r/NBA, individual team subreddits, r/CollegeBasketball, r/Basketball, and many others. You can interact with fans, get news, rumors, and other information. You can usually find stuff from a variety of news sources as well. We saw a variety of sources during our testing. A lot of it is word-of-mouth stuff, but it’s still a good place to interact with other fans of the sport. The app is entirely free with ads. There are monthly and annual subscription options to remove ads and add other features.
SofaScore is an excellent app for sports fans. It keeps track of scores across various leagues and you can check them whenever you want. It includes a simple UI, some extra features depending on the sport, and it covers dozens of leagues around the world. For basketball fans, the app shows a score graph so you can see visual representations of how much a team led by at any given point in the game. Plus, it includes a heat map of where players took shots. The app is also cheap and super effective.
theScore is an excellent sports app for NBA fans. It has all of the usual stuff, including scores, updates, standings, stats, and news. It also gives you the option to personalize your feed with only the sports and teams you want to hear about. The UI is quite good for a sports news app and the customization makes it even better. The only real gripe are the ads. They can be disruptive at times. However, for a free service, it’s difficult to complain too much since it could be way worse. Some people have some gripes, but no service is for everybody. This is a good one for people who don’t a massive, heavy experience like ESPN or Yahoo Sports.
TuneIn Radio
Price: Free / $9.99 per month / $99.99 per year
TuneIn Radio is an app for radio fans. It includes a ton of stations, including most local AM and FM radio stations. That makes it easier to listen to NBA games and college basketball games on the radio even when there isn’t a radio nearby. Plus, people who really like their radio broadcasters can listen to the game how they want to, on the radio. There is a premium service that offers additional live play-by-play coverage of NBA games (along with NFL and MLB games) for $9.99 per month. However, we only recommend that if you’re really into radio services. The free version with local stations should be enough for most people.
Twitter is a truly awful place most of the time. However, it’s where all of the NBA, college basketball, and general basketball bloggers and players hang out (well, Twitter and Instagram). You can also follow the NBA itself, individual teams, all of the blogs and news sites we’ve mentioned so far, and many other personalities. Instagram is similarly good for following individual players, but not so much individual teams or writing personalities.
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Yahoo Sports is one of the biggest NBA apps and basketball apps. It is also ESPN’s rival. It covers most sports, and that includes college basketball, NBA, WNBA, and women’s college basketball. That’s basically all of the basketball that most people would want to read about. The site has some customization features, notification alerts, and also schedules, scores, highlights, news, trades, and more. Yahoo also has a robust fantasy sports platform with its own app. Both of them are free with advertising.
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
You no longer need a cable subscription to watch live TV. There are about half a dozen live TV apps that you can subscribe to, often for a fraction of the cost. Most of them include local TV stations and that should include your local sports channels as well. Most of them also have ESPN packages and other sports packages for additional basketball games and coverage. We can’t recommend any one in particular because they all function properly and after that, it’s all preference. We have our list of the best live TV apps linked at the button above and a huge comparison of the top five competitors linked in the widget just below.
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