The BBC Sport app covers all your sport news from football, to badminton, rugby to horse racing, and allows you to watch all of these events live. So when it’s time to watch that crucial game for your home team, or you need to check some important results quickly, it can be frustrating when the BBC Sport app not working on Android ruins your day.
Right now you may have no idea what the problem could be, but whatever it is, we are here to help. Whether it’s something wrong with the BBC servers, your internet connection is having problems, or your device is bugging out, we can help. We have some quick and easy, step-by-step instructions to help you get reconnected and back in the game!
BBC Sport App not working on Android? – Try this
You get back from work and pull out your phone. It’s time to catch up with how your team did in that game today. To your surprise, tapping on the BBC Sport app does nothing, you are faced with a loading screen, or it still has yesterday’s results and nothing from today. What’s wrong with it? There are some quick fixes, and some not-so-quick. Let’s start with the quick ones you can do right this minute.
Checking whether you are in airplane mode is a quick and easy fix if you accidentally pressed it while picking your phone up. This can completely disconnect you from Wi-Fi, so until it’s disabled you won’t be able to connect.
Another quick fix is turning your device off and on again. This can, by itself, fix a lot of other issues, and is the easiest to do, so it’s always a good one to try first. But if that doesn’t work, then you will need to take a few more steps to solve your issue.
Make sure you’re logged in correctly
Unlike some other BBC services, the BBC Sport app requires a valid login account to be verified with an email address – this is the same for BBC iPlayer too. Ensure you’ve logged in properly and verified your account, or the app won’t load.
Check the BBC server status
The BBC has thousands of servers all over the world, and these are providing updates, data and stability to the app on your phone. Sometimes though, something goes wrong. Maybe a big game is on, and so many people are trying to watch it at once that the servers become overloaded and can potentially break.
Other times, there may just be scheduled maintenance. Either way, you can find out the BBC’s server status by going to their twitter page here, and seeing if there are any outage updates. If there are, you may have to wait a little while for them to come back up.
Connection issues
So, the first thing that you should check is the BBC Sport apps server to see if the issue is their end. Most of the time, their server will be fine, and the likely culprit of connection issues may be your own Wi-Fi connection. If that’s the case, there are a few steps you can take to get yourself reconnected.
Checking your Wi-Fi network
The first thing you need to do is make sure your Wi-Fi is the problem, and not the app itself. The best way to do this is to quickly check other apps or sites that require a connection, like Google, and see if they work and you can use them without any problems. If you can, then you can move on to updating your app, but if the other sites also don’t work, then your Wi-Fi is the issue.
Try making sure you have a good signal. If you are too far from your router, then your Wi-Fi connection can be weak and unstable. Get close to your router with a direct line of sight and try to connect to the internet again. If this still doesn’t work, then there’s a problem with your router.
Resetting your router
Sometimes your router is just having a bad day and needs a little wake-up-call to get itself working properly again. The way to do this is by unplugging both your power and phoneline from the back of your router, waiting 30 seconds, then reconnecting it.
After a few seconds it will have a whole new IP, and hopefully with it, a strong network connection. You can also try switching over to your mobile network too and see if this fixes the issue.
Update the BBC Sport app
I think we are all guilty of letting update notifications pile up from time to time; I do it too, but sometimes these updates can be crucial. If you haven’t updated your app in a while, or it’s been unable to update for whatever reason, it can eventually stop working entirely.
If you have an internet connection, your app should update automatically, but sometimes it won’t. Make sure you go into your app settings and check for updates, then restart your phone and see if the app works when you’ve updated to the latest version.
Clear the cache and data
Apps can sometimes become so clogged up with data and cache that they slow down and even stop working in some cases. If nothing else has worked for you so far, you can try clearing your app’s data. Make sure you write down any login details before you do this, as your login data and preferences will be wiped. You can clear your data by following the screenshots below.
Making sure you clear data on your device is always a good idea, as it can stop you from seeing an error message.
Re-install the BBC Sport app
If nothing else has worked, your best bet is to completely reinstall your app. Sometime’s it’s just too far gone, or there’s some stubborn error that just refuses to go away, so the best thing to do is just delete the app and start again with a fresh version.
Conclusion
The BBC Spot app is used by millions of people every day and very rarely has issues. Keeping your apps updated and making sure your internet connection is working correctly will likely save you from ever having a problem catching up with the latest sport news.
