Yahoo is a giant in the fantasy sports world, but its app hasn't received a significant update in years. However, ahead of the 2024 NFL season, the company is launching a completely revamped version of the app. Yahoo Fantasy Sports App which brings a cleaner design and a huge amount of new content for fantasy players.
The new app is split into three sections. The first thing you see when you open the app is a list of all your fantasy teams across all sports — football is by far the most popular, but Yahoo also offers baseball, basketball, and more fantasy sports, and part of the team’s goal with the new app is to get you playing new fantasy games. There’s also a News tab with content dedicated to fantasy players, and a Scores tab that shows all the scores that matter to you and your fantasy teams. Previously, all of that content lived separately in the Yahoo Sports app, but now it’s right there alongside your fantasy games.
As far as the nuts and bolts of fantasy gaming go, not much has changed. Yahoo has improved the app’s design so you can see your entire team on the screen at once and switch teams more easily. With new logos and icons, you can also customize your team, but the app should feel familiar to anyone who’s used it before. Despite how old the app is, Yahoo Sports president Ryan Spoon says it’s still a huge success. It wasn’t intended to be a complete reboot, just an improvement.
The general idea behind the new app, Spoon tells me, is to make it a more complete experience for fans. “When I wake up on Sunday,” he says, “let me have the news. Let me change my team. And during the game, let me see my team or see the score.” Previously, that process required two or three different apps; Yahoo now expects you to do it all in one place.
One of the advantages of building a fantasy football app, Spoon says, is that you know exactly how people are going to use it. “Tuesday morning, you say, ‘Tell me what happened during the week and put together the list of available players,’” Spoon says. “Wednesday, put together the list of available players.” From Thursday night to Monday night, it all comes down to roster adjustments and a million check-ins a day to see how your team is doing. Repeat over and over, roughly 14 weeks a year.
Yahoo is working to improve every part of that process, including a possible redesign of the desktop web app, but Spoon says mobile is at the heart of the experience. “Eighty-five percent of our users used the mobile app last year,” it says, “and more than two-thirds of them used it every day. Usage is really high.”
Since Spoon joined Yahoo from ESPN about a year ago, it has been adding new content and features to the entire Yahoo Sports platform. As football gets underway this year, there will be more fantasy-related news, more fantasy-related shows, and more fantasy-related everything. Through all of its ups and downs as a company, Yahoo has somehow remained one of the top fantasy platforms, and that seems to be the central linchpin for everything Yahoo wants to do next.
