Apple Sports 2.0 launched Monday, adding support for Live Activities so real-time game updates appear on the iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens.

The free app also takes over displaying scores in the iPhone Dynamic Island.

The new Apple Sports app for iPhone gives fans access to real-time scores, stats and more for their favorite teams across a wide range of sports leagues. It first debuted in February and updates brought a range of improvements, especially for football fans.

Now that the iOS 18 and watchOS 11 updates launched, Apple Sports 2.0 added support for Live Activities for all supported teams and leagues. The feature displays live scores and play-by-play information directly on users' iPhone and Apple Watch Lock Screens. It allows for quick glances at game progress for people unable to watch games directly.

Just so there's no confusion, this feature requires iOS 18 and watchOS 11 but the Sport app itself does not.

Before the Apple Sports app launched, the Apple TV app took care of posting sports scores in the iPhone Dynamic Island. With Monday's update, Sports 2.0 takes care of this... a more logical system.

And these aren't the only improvements. The application introduced a new drop-down navigation for the main scorecard views. The intent is to streamline the user experience, making it faster to switch between My Leagues, My Teams and favorited league feeds.

In addition, an enhanced search function helps users view matches for leagues they don't currently follow.

Apple Sports is ready to download beginning Wednesday in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. As noted, it is free to install and use, and is available for all iPhone models running iOS 17.2 or later. The software runs on iPad too, but it isn't optimized for the tablet screen. So it runs in an iPhone-size window on iPads.

The app supports English, as well as French and Spanish where available.