Football fans "are well catered-for when it comes to ways to follow the sport on our smartphones," according to Stuart Dredge of the London GUARDIAN. One of the most popular football apps, though, "doesn't come from an established media brand." German startup Motain launched The Football App in '08, and "it has since rolled out across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Samsung's connected TVs." The app "has been downloaded" more than 10 million times, but Founder Lucas von Cranach said that is "not the best measure of its performance." Cranach: "Everybody talks about downloads, but downloads isn't a currency if people aren't using your application. We have close to 5 million monthly active users, and they're highly engaged, with up to 1.5 million daily active users." Until now, The Football App "has focused on news, scores and commentaries, stats and other content drawn from various media partners." That is "changing today, with a new feature called Fan Zone that aims to get fans chatting much more around all this content" (GUARDIAN, 10/2).
