A few months ago I started getting my sports scores from Apple Sports.

The app allows you to choose your favorite teams and leagues, and then it gives you a simple, well-designed experience that shows you the scores and the live stats of relevant games. You can see textual representations of standings, box scores, and live play-by-plays, but there are no videos, no feeds to scroll through, and no articles. It’s just the pure essence of what the app claims to be: sports scores.

It brought me back to a former age, Apple under the leadership of Steve Jobs.

I felt a feeling of delight reminiscent of when the iPhone first came out. Back then, there was something delightful about having a decent camera on your phone plus the novel simplicity of the design. You could sense that Jobs actually cared about the experience you had using your phone. The proof of this was in the pudding. He was making a product that let you do things - simple things - you previously could not do, things that were self-evidently valuable to you.

It’s easy to understand the value of the Camera app. Or any number of other apps from that first launch: Notes, Books, Calculator, Calendar, Clock, Messages, and so on.

“What would I use this for?” was not a thought in the back of your mind. The thought was, “Wow, that’s great! I’d definitely use this.”

I got this feeling again the first time I used Apple Sports. Apple had truly removed the distractions from the experience of checking the score. Coming from other, more distracting sports apps with news feeds and endless content, it was a breath of fresh air. It delights me to know that I can check the score, definitely not get distracted, and then put the phone back down.

In a word, this is respectful. The experience is respecting my time and attention. And I am responding to it with delight and a better opinion of the company. Here I am, promoting their product without having been paid or incentivized to do so in any way, other than the fact that I am a customer who is satisfied with a product.

I imagine this is what Steve Jobs was going for all along.