On-Course Tracking

How a round flows

1. Start the round on your iPhone. Pick the course (we detect nearby courses automatically) and the tees you're playing. Your watch wakes up.
2. Play. The watch tracks your shots in two phases: tap to mark where you swung, then tap again when the ball comes to rest. That gives us the actual carry distance per shot, accurate to GPS resolution.
3. Score the hole on the watch or phone. Score, putts, fairway hit, GIR, bunkers, penalties: as much detail as you want to log, all optional except score.
4. End the round on the iPhone. The post-round AI recap loads on the round summary screen within seconds.

Two-phase shot tracking, explained

Most golf apps make you tap once per shot, which means they only know where the ball ended up. We capture two GPS points per shot: where you swung from and where the ball came to rest. That's how we get real carry distance, real dispersion, and a real shot-by-shot replay.

The two taps take a fraction of a second each, and you can do them on the watch without pulling your phone out. If you forget a tap, the round summary lets you edit holes and shots after the fact.

Watch vs phone: who does what

The watch is the sensor and the in-the-moment UI. The phone is the brain and the source of truth. They sync continuously over Bluetooth (and fall back to WiFi or cellular when needed).

• Watch handles GPS, the shot-tap UI, the live distance to pin, the live scorecard quick-edit, and offline durability if connectivity drops.
• Phone handles the round map, the full-edit scorecard, AI brief and recap, sync to the cloud, and serves as the authoritative writer to the database.

The architecture is event-sourced: every action (start, shot tapped, hole scored, end) emits a durable event that the phone drains to the cloud. That means a dropped Bluetooth signal mid-round doesn't lose data; it queues and syncs when the watch reconnects.

Breadcrumb and replay

We keep a full GPS breadcrumb of where you walked during the round. After the round, you can open the replay map and see every shot drawn on the hole, with the breadcrumb showing your path between shots. It's the closest thing to watching your round from above without a drone.

Replay is also where the AI recap pulls its hole-by-hole context. When the recap says "your worst hole was the 7th, where you were short-sided into the bunker," it's reading the actual GPS coordinates and lie data your watch logged.

Discarding a round

Mid-round, the iPhone has a "Discard Round" button (with a confirmation prompt) that ends the round without saving it as a played round. Useful for test rounds, accidental starts, or rounds where you stopped after a few holes.

After a round is ended, you can also delete it from the round list. Deletion is soft (we keep the data internally for analytics and quality work, but it disappears from your view and your stats). See Privacy & Data for the full deletion behavior.