my confusion with buffering on Kodi

firstly let me say that this post is not a bitch nor complaint

I’m 72 now and on State Pension, so cannot afford to pay for my TV & Sports and can honestly say that Kodi
has been a revelation for my and my wife – we now enjoy unlimited free sports, films and TV shows
that we never had access to before – and this is all down to the skill and goodwill of Kodi and the developers
we cannot thank you all enough

I am a quick learner though, and now have a very well configured Kodi 16.1 as our main entertainment.
buffering was a bit of an issue, but I have learned how to configure the advanced settings,
and have even forked out for an Nvidia Shield to better enjoy ourselves

however,
whilst I appreciate that people will say any buffering we still get is most likely to be due to the streams themselves, I cannot understand why a certain Android Sports app now banned on Google Play (M*****)
seems more stable.
I follow Ruby League’s Super League games – mostly on Sly 2 and can often get stuttering and buffering …
yet if I shut Kodi down and immediately go to that app, it is mostly rock solid (albeit with a worse quality picture)

I cannot understand then why one application does not buffer and the other does …
especially when running on the same hardware, and using a stream from the same broadcaster
surely both get their streams from similar sources?

any ideas anyone?