The official March Madness app is so good, providing comprehensive free coverage of the tournament, complete with free streaming video, it’s almost surprising that anyone bothers to make a competing app. Sports Illustrated Front Row attempts to find a niche in photo geeks who might prefer their March Madness confined to scores and still frames, but it’s not any real threat to the reigning March Madness app champions.
While it’s certainly worthy of applause that the SI Front Row app tries to focus its energies in other places, there’s too much missing. Sure, it has the scores for each round of the tournament, but there’s no box score anywhere. If you want to see any sort of details about a game, you have to leave the app, which makes you wonder why you’re looking at the app in the first place.
But oh, the photos! That’s why! And they are very cool photos. The Front Row in the app name must apply to the view of many of these photos, which expertly put you as close to the action as possible without lying down in the middle of the court. They’re great. But you can’t save them or view them outside of the app.
So you have an app for a major event with one prominent feature that is slightly less effective because everything you see is contained within the app. Sports Illustrated Front Row even lacks any sort of social media connection, so you can’t share your favorite pictures with your friends.
There’s a lot you could do with March Madness photos, but unfortunately Sports Illustrated Front Row doesn’t go the extra mile in this instance. Better luck next year.
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