The best World Cup apps: Yahoo's definitive guide

It's not enough to watch every game, collect the stickers and take part in the office sweepstake. As World Cup fever sweeps the nation (along with a tidal wave of clichés), you'll need a way to stay on top of news from Brazil 24/7. An app, if you will. But which one?

Yahoo has gone to the effort of trying out the foremost World Cup and sports news apps to weed out the Andy Carroll's from the Andrea Pirlo's. This is our definitive list of the best World Cup apps - with a couple of stinkers thrown in as a warning. Oh, and they're all free.

OneFootball Brasil (iOS and Android)

Good: Where to start? It's pretty, it's simple, and it's packed with features. Choose your team and you can opt to receive notifications relevant to them. There are the usual tables, schedule and squad listings (complete with player twitter feeds), plus news feeds and live action updates.

That's not all - there is also a dedicated stats section, detailing the tournament leaderboards for yellow cards, assists, you name it. And there's a history of the World Cup thrown in for good measure. It's the most complete app we've seen so far.

Bad: Not a lot. It's a corporate tie-in with VolksWagen but to be honest, that's discreet enough not to make a difference.

FIFA's official app (iOS and Android)

Good: It looks nice. Fifa hasn't gone overboard with the design, with a nice 'frosted-glass' effect and clean, typographically pleasing presentation. It has a section on the official Fifa world rankings for all international teams, including beach football, futsal and Olympic football.

There's a match schedule, and a handy button to add every game to your calendar. But tt's not a dedicated World Cup app, although the world cup does make up a lot of its content. So you also get general international football news, and it gives it a lifespan beyond July 13th.

Bad: The Fifa rankings aren't explained or added to with any supplementary information, and in any case, we all know they're a load of tosh, right?

There's no way to reorganise the match schedule chronologically - it can only be viewed by group - and there's no way to only add selected matches to your calendar.

ESPN FC (iOS and Android)

Good: The match schedule is laid out chronologically, which is great if you're the kind of person who likes to organise their calendar in a sensible fashion.

There is a lot of content to read and watch while you're waiting for the tournament to kick off - team profiles, news and in-depth reports - we happened upon a stat-filled article all about that most fated of World Cup scenarios, the penalty shoot-out.

Score tables are easier to find than in FIFA's app.

Bad: Right from the get-go it wants you to sign in or register. Although if you're an ESPN subscriber in the US this does allow you to access video highlights. But that's not a problem for us Brits with our terrestrial telly.

The built-in twitter stream is mostly footballers' tweets, which are usually either bland, branded or in a foreign language.

BBC Sport (iOS and Android)

Good: It's BBC Sport. Its reputation precedes it. If it's sport and it's news, it's here. Everything's clear and organised, with sections for results, fixtures, tables, schedule and team info. There's also a handy map of where fixtures are being played - something no other map had (it's under Groups and Schedule).

There's also buckets of video content from years gone by, in-depth features and analysis.

Bad: You have to dig a bit to find the World Cup section, and the same applies when you click through to Fixtures.

Eurosport (iOS and Android)

Good: As you would expect from a major broadcaster, it's a well-made, in-depth sports news app. Content is split into 'Headline', 'Latest', 'Popular' and 'Videos', or you can swipe between dozens of pages of stories.

If you're momentarily done with World Cup news, dozens of other sports are represented, including Speedway, Nordic Combined Skiing and the European Poker tour.

Bad: We couldn't get any stories to appear under 'Popular' for the World Cup. It's better as a news source than as a World Cup planner; there is a results section (found via a not-immediately-obvious permalink in the upper right hand corner) but there's no way to view upcoming matches chronologically.

Yahoo Sport (iOS and Android)

Good: It prompts you to set up your favourite teams straight away, so you know you're getting the news you want. But non-partisan fans may find this a turn-off. We like little things like the 'refresh' icon is a sporty 'S' that flickers electric blue.

One menu button lets you jump to whatever's live at the time. The number of other sports on the app is growing all the time - there's a definite skew in favour of football, but American sports, golf, cricket, cycling, F1, rugby and tennis are also represented.

Bad: On iPad, the app forces you to use it in landscape format; there's no auto-rotate. But the format does allow you to browse news stories in one pane and keep an eye on scores or tables in another at the same time. That's nice. On phones the app will rotate, but you have to cycle between news, scores and tables.

There's no way to find video content specifically, and there's no match planner - but it's a news app first and foremost. Download the app here!

World Cup 2014 by ITNEXT (iOS and Android)

Good: Well, good-ish. Punch 'World Cup 2014' into the app store and you'll be met by dozen upon dozen of official-looking apps. Most of these, based on the handful we tried, are carbon-copy clones of each other, with minimal content or functionality to write about and a very varied standard of reliability. If you've got something against the mainstream apps and/or just want an unfussy score tracker, this is one of the better ones.

What we like is that you can click through lists of groups or teams to find info on even the most obscure squad players. If you need to settle once and for all which third-choice keeper is taller, Bosnia & Herzegovina's J. Fejzic or Iran's Alireza Haghighi, this is the app for you.

Bad: It's pretty simple and it crashes occasionally.

Squawka (iOS)

Good: Once you're in, there is a very satisfying depth of football stats, infographics and tweets. All the major european leagues are covered, plus the US, Brazil, Mexico and Australia.

Bad: You have to be a registered user, or login with Twitter or Facebook - both of which demand higher access privileges (your email address, contacts list) than the app needs. The app crashed when we registered, but it recovered. No iPad version. BUT most importantly: there is currently NO WORLD CUP SECTION. Rumour has it Squawka may launch a World Cup app, in which case we will update this list...

LiveScore (iOS and Android)

Good: We like the dark colour scheme. You can go back into qualification matches, if you want to settle an argument. They're so keen they've already posted predicted line-ups for Brazil-Croatia on 12 June. It's easy to navigate from the scores feed to group tables and back again, and to balance your data costs/fear of missing out, you can choose precisely how often the app updates the scores.

Bad: The menus are all navigated by icons at the bottom of the screen, not all of which are immediately intuitive (they nearly all involve a football in different circumstances).

It's strongly football-oriented. That's fine for the World Cup, we acknowledge, but for your long-term use, only football, hockey, basketball and tennis are represented. Also they call football 'soccer'.

SofaScore (iOS)

Good: It's another live-score app, which can deliver a wealth of live notifications, even prodding you for every red card and line-up announcement. Lets you vote on individual match results, and generates predictions based on all users of the app. Fun, if unsurprising most of the time.

Aside from the World Cup, it covers 13 other sports from 46 countries, and lets you favourite anything you want to follow. Displays match calendar and group tables.

Bad: It's not bad, but it doesn't stand out for any particular reason.

Panini Collectors

Good: It feeds your addiction to World Cup stickers, which are undeniably great, by adding another layer of stats. You can log your percentage of completion, which really gets to the heart of what sticker collecting is all about.

It does, technically, absolve you of the need to carry around your sticker book and advertise your football nerdiness to others. If you scan every sticker correctly, you can keep lists of your 'Got', 'Need' and 'Swaps'.

Bad: It's a bit glitchy throughout, and the sticker scanning is by far the most notable aspect of this. Frequently we found it failing to recognise a sticker in front of it, and even more commonly it will mistake one player for another.

That's forgivable in players that look alike, but our app confused Andre Schurrle with Damarcus Beasley. On the other hand, we're prepared to accept that an app that can fairly accurately distinguish between the faces of 600-odd men simply by pointing your camera at them would have seemed like magic a couple of tournaments ago.

Football on TV (iOS)

Good: It's a very simple and comprehensive guide to when football is on television, be it Europa League, Spanish second division or of course, the World Cup.

Bad: Subscription is required to 'unlock' match details beyond June 14 for the World Cup, costing £1.99 a year, Which in our book is still a lot to pay for freely available information. But you may decide the convenience outweighs the cost.

And two you should avoid:

Football Coupon (iOS)

Good: This looks like a handy app for comparing betting odds from all major bookmakers. We should urge you to gamble cautiously and bet within your limits, but a few small bets during the World Cup should be fairly harmless fun.

Bad: The app crashes constantly and is totally unusable.

Caxi & Roll - The New 2014 Vuvuzela  (iOS)

Bad: Just as the vuvuzela was the ubiquitous object of hate and irritation at the 2010 South Africa world cup, the caxirola will be the bugbear of Brazil 2014. Pronounced 'ka-shi-roller', it's essentially a very basic plastic percussion instrument, filled with bits of plastic that shake and rattle around inside. The overall effect is that of a cantankerous grandad shaking a bottle of pills. But good news! The sound of a caxirola is now available as an app - simply shake your phone to annoy everyone within earshot. Needless to say, the app itself is just as cheaply made and devoid of appealing qualities.