The Ultimate Guide to Personalizing Your ESPN App on iPhone and Mac

On iPhone the install is the easy part. Open the App Store, search for ESPN, tap Get, and you are watching in under a minute on Wi-Fi. The Mac side is slightly different and trips people up, so it is worth saying plainly. On an Apple silicon Mac you can install the iPhone or iPad version straight from the Mac App Store, since it shows up under the iPhone and iPad Apps tab on a compatible machine. On an older Intel Mac there is no native app, so you watch through ESPN.com in Safari or Chrome instead, which honestly works fine for scores and articles.

Whichever route you take, the single most important step is to sign in with your ESPN account first, before you touch any settings. Your favorite teams, alerts, and layout are tied to that account, so signing in is what lets the work you do on the iPhone carry over to the Mac without redoing it. If you want live games from networks like ESPN itself, you will also link a TV provider or an ESPN subscription, and in our testing the smoothest path was to confirm that login once on the iPhone, then let the Mac inherit it.

This is where the app goes from generic to genuinely yours. Open the settings, find Favorites, and add every team you follow across every league. The moment you do, the Home tab reorders itself around those teams, pushing their scores, news, and highlights to the top and quietly demoting the rest. We added a couple of college programs alongside the usual pro teams, and the feed immediately stopped burying the games we cared about under unrelated headlines.

A few choices made the biggest difference for us:

• Favorite the teams, not just the leagues. Following a whole league still floods you; following four or five specific teams is what makes the feed feel curated.
• Reorder your favorites. Drag your number one team to the top of the list so its games and news always lead, even on a busy slate.
• Prune as the seasons change. Drop a team you stopped following and the clutter goes with it, which keeps the feed honest year round.

On the Mac the same favorites appear because they live with your account, so you set this up once and reap it everywhere. It is the closest thing the app has to a magic button.

Notifications are the feature people either love or rage-quit, and the trick is being selective. In the alerts settings you can choose, team by team, exactly what pings you: game start, final score, scoring plays, close-game warnings, news, and more. We turned on finals and close-game alerts for our top teams and left everything else off, and the phone went from buzzing constantly to telling us only the things we actually wanted to know.

Beyond alerts, a handful of touches earned permanent spots for us:

• Scores at a glance: the Scores tab filters down to your leagues, and on iPhone you can add the ESPN widget to your Home Screen so a glance shows the latest without opening anything.
• Live activities on iPhone: for supported games the score can ride along on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, which is great when you are half watching and half doing something else.
• Picture in picture for streams: start a live game, swipe away, and it shrinks into a corner so you can read a recap or check another score while play continues.

If you also follow basketball closely, the dedicated league app is worth a look alongside ESPN, and our walkthrough of the hidden features in the NBA app pairs nicely with this setup.

A few small habits made the app feel faster and calmer for us, and none of them are obvious from the menus.

• Trim notifications first, then add back. Start with everything off and switch on only finals and close games for your top team. It is far easier than muting a flood after the fact.
• Use the search to favorite obscure teams. Smaller college or international clubs are in there; just search the exact name and tap the star.
• Add the widget before a big weekend. Long press the Home Screen, add the ESPN widget, and you get live scores without unlocking into the app every few minutes.
• Keep iOS, macOS, and the app current. A stale version was behind one nagging stream stutter on our older test phone, and an update quietly fixed it.
• Sign in on every device once. The five seconds it takes is what syncs your favorites and alerts so you are not rebuilding the feed on the Mac later.

Do these once and the app mostly disappears into the background, surfacing your teams and staying quiet otherwise, which is exactly what you want from a sports companion.

For all it does well, the app is not flawless, and it is fairer to flag the rough spots up front. The biggest one is the line between free and paid. Plenty of scores, news, and highlights are free, but a lot of the actual live games sit behind a TV provider login or an ESPN subscription, and the app is not always crystal clear about which is which until you tap a game and hit a wall. Knowing that going in saves the small frustration of expecting a stream and getting a sign-in prompt.

A couple of other quirks are worth your patience. The Home feed can still slip in promoted content and trending stories that have nothing to do with your favorites, so even a well tuned feed is not perfectly pure. On the Mac, running the iPhone app in a window means the layout is built for a phone and can feel a touch cramped, and the Safari site, while reliable, is a slightly different experience from the app. None of this is a dealbreaker, but they are real, and a fan who watches live every week will feel them more than a casual scores checker.

ESPN is the natural hub for scores, alerts, and broad coverage, but no single app has every game, and most fans we know pair it with one or two others. For specific leagues, the league owned apps often carry games and angles ESPN does not, so they slot in rather than replace it. And for broadcast networks, a sports forward streaming app fills the live gaps ESPN leaves open on a given night.

If you want another sports app with a genuinely fresh take, our look at how Vision Pro is changing Fox Sports is a fun companion read. And if you are still building out your lineup, it is worth browsing the wider best streaming and TV apps for iPhone roundup, or the full Streaming and TV category for more hands on guides. The right mix really comes down to which teams and leagues you live for, and once ESPN is tuned to yours, it is a calm, quick way to keep up.