Some sporting activities lend themselves rather well to solitary pursuits – running, cycling and swimming, to name but a few. But others require your fellow man and woman to enjoy in full.
Yes, one of the most frustrating things in the world can be when you get a hankering to partake in a game of football, tennis or basketball, only to discover nobody you know is available when you need them. This is where Sporty for iPhone wants to help.
Courtesy of Mathias Mikkelsen, the same developer behind Timely, Sporty wants to make it easy as pie to create and join different sporting activities, based on your location. So if you’re an organizer looking for more players, then Sporty’s your guy – or if you’re one of the aforementioned ‘more players’, Sporty’s your guy too.
You can see all activities happening near you and when they’re scheduled to start, though if you’d rather use it as a tool for organizing sporting meetups with friends, things can be kept private too.
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While there has been similar initiaives in the past to create activity-enabling tools such as this, there has yet to be a clear winner in this space – a mobile-first app and automatic go-to for all your sporting needs. But such platforms need a lot of users for it to be of any real use, and this actually leads us to an important point, one that may deter people from using Sporty.
Some apps absolutely require Facebook login to function. Others don’t. I’d put Sporty in the latter of these categories – while having Facebook as a login option is great, making it compulsory may deter many from using this service. For Sporty to be effective, it needs as many users on board as possible, so by limiting it to iPhone users who are happy to tie things up with their Facebook profile, they’re probably missing a trick.
But this is only version one – using Facebook is an easy way for the service to ‘outsource’ the logging-in element. We’re told that Twitter and email options will be added in the future, while a version for Android will be following at some point too.
Sporty is available to download from the App Store now.
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