The idea of an app that helps you locate good sports bars sounds ideal. Sports bars come in all sorts: Some favor specific teams, some only serve certain kinds of beers, and so on. But the Sports Bar Finder app doesn’t capitalize on any of that. Instead, the app feels like a lazy collection of restaurants on a map.
To be fair, it’s a robust list of restaurants. If I wanted to know where to eat in the vicinity of my current location, Sports Bar Finder would be a very handy app. That’s because it seems to not only list bars that are near me, but also restaurants of all kinds, including breakfast spots and even a McDonalds.
The layout for this information is nicely done, as well. Everything is easy to read and understand, and the app comes with few handy buttons that let you email a friend the bar’s information or get directions from the Google Map app on the iPhone.
What it doesn’t do is, unfortunately, the whole point. Sports Bar Finder will tell you if a bar favors NBA or NFL games (and you can search for bars that only favor specific sports), but you won’t find any info on food, specials or a description of any kind.
Indeed, what this app seems to be is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Rather than a sports bar finder, this is a DirecTV finder. The app seems to simply find all locations that subscribe to DirecTV’s cable packages. This isn’t exactly the same as a “sports bar finder” because that McDonalds, for instance, probably isn’t playing a lot of sports on its TVs, much less serving alcohol.
That said, if you’re looking for a list of restaurants that have DirecTV and might or might not be showing sports, the Sports Bar Finder app is probably the best one out there. If you’re actually looking for the best sports bar to watch your favorite team? Well, keep looking.
