Atlanta Falcons Mobile

The Atlanta Falcons Mobile app for Android has been rebuilt from the ground up! Just imagine showing up to the stadium gates and having your ticket locked behind a frozen screen of an app as you feverishly jab at it with the line growing behind you – The Falcons App represents one of the most infuriating aspects of today's sports fandom, digital reliance, where users are preyed upon by small bugs that become giant glitches (the Atlanta Falcons on the App Store have one-star ratings) in an application that often keeps owners from gaining WiFi access to their tickets forcing them to burn through data turning what should be narrow entrance into more of a game of connectivity-based Russian roulette.

The YinzCam Cookie-Cutter Experience

The app was developed and is maintained by YinzCam, a company that has created apps for other sports including NFL, NBA, NHL teams. This production-line method results in a templated experience, and the Falcons app feels exactly like the Bears or Bills or Saints apps, just painted with a different color scheme. It's standardized down to every element: gameday guide with the same layout, a simply named concession mapping interface, near-identical ticket management system—it's almost a white-label product that each of these teams slapped their branding on. Fundamental features include live game video highlights with NFL.com's official stats directly from the league stats office, the sack and turnover channels, live press conferences, roster and depth charts, and full team information. The app touts exclusive in-stadium experiences such as Spirited Self-Service Cocktails, Checkout-free Markets and Delta Fly-Through Lanes—premium services that require consumers to register beyond the app. Nothing says localized customization in a sea of generic platform scores quite like the retractable roof status indicator at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

The Digital Ticket Hostage Situation

All tickets are paperless and must be downloaded to mobile wallet or viewed through the Atlanta Falcons app, screenshots will not suffice. This imperative for digitalization creates single points of failure: dead batteries, broken screens, connectivity challenges or app crashes can deter entry to the stadium. Many fans report spending significant time on support calls only to be told they need to get in line for manual assistance at the event, where many other individuals are getting new cards at the window. The WiFi paradox – At the same time the app repeatedly bombs out on stadium WiFi that's been deployed for fan usage (thus forcing fans to turn to overloaded cell networks) all stadium networks fall over with 70,000 people trying to access information at the same time. A recent update tried to "fix Ticketmaster crash" though the integration involved in ticketing systems can be overly delicate. Users have written about having to uninstall and reinstall the app as many as a dozen times throughout a season, with all saved preferences and login details lost.

Data Harvesting in Team Colors

The app asks for a number of far-reaching permissions: location tracking (including when the app isn't currently in use), use of your camera, access to phone contacts and storage, network activity monitoring. YinzCam pools this data across the entire portfolio to generate holistic fan profiles that cut across sport, league and venue. As a global sports fan network already used by more than 100 million people worldwide, YinzCam now tracks fans – from the size of their drink at half-time to how often they went to the bathroom as well as food and merchandise purchases. Push notifications deluge users with "breaking news" on practice squad promotions, sponsored content masquerading as team updates and ceaseless prompts to spend money on merchandise. The "personalized account center" basically only exists to upsell you into premium experiences, link your credit card for "frictionless" stadium spending and allow teams' sponsors to use location-based marketing. To opt out, you have to navigate through obscure settings menus, which reset each time an app is updated.

Technical Debt and Fan Frustration

Reviews all say crash, one user said "I have a $5k Samsung Ultra 25 all my other apps work except Falcons APP. Gameday and can't get to my tix". The 76MB app is bloating to over 300MB on some devices, messages in the background are clobbering battery life and consuming more than 20% per hour on gameday use cases as users stream their location to multiple servers. Even on high-speed internet connections, the video player buffers indefinitely, frequently refusing to load highlights that play perfectly well on Twitter or YouTube. The YinzCam team doesn't even build the Falcons app now — that's done directly by the Atlanta Falcons Football Club, although the underlying platform is supplied by YinzCam as a framework. This handoff left a support vacuum for users seeking help — there's nothing between YinzCam, in general, and the Falcons' overworked digital squad.

Who This Serves (Barely)

Season ticket holders have no options — fans are required to use the app as part of the infrastructure for attending games. Casual fans get little they can't find just as well done on ESPN or The Athletic with better interfaces. The much-ballyhooed in-stadium upgrades rely on additional apps (mobile ordering), accounts (parking) and fees (premium experiences) to create a scattered experience across platforms. And, one frustrated fan concludes "another shady app to push merch trash on 'fans'… I'd prefer a hard copy ticket but then my team can't swindle me." (It does, however, manage to achieve its real purpose: clamping down on digital ticketing monopolies and mining fan data for marketing and new revenue streams via "convenience" fees.) Watching highlights, checking scores, reading news — the fan experience just works better through any literal alternative source. Atlanta Falcons Mobile is the absolute paragon of professional sports' worst modern trend: a required app that barely works, created primarily to siphon maximum cash off fans while offering the tiniest possible viable functionality, forcing fans into an artificial digital submission or exclusion from an in-stadium experience for which they are already paying hundreds of dollars, hiding behind a false façade of "enhanced fan engagement," as if there were any reason why fans needed a technological middleman nobody wanted but everybody needs to put up with.