Features

Live scoring, built for one hand and a glove

Scoring competes with walking, talking, and getting to the next tee. Anything that takes more than a few seconds gets abandoned by the seventh hole. Here is what entering a score in ParPath costs you, and everything you can record beyond the number.

What entering a score actually costs

Two taps. The score picker puts the plausible numbers for the hole under your thumb as large targets. You hit the one you made, then save, and the hole is done. No keyboard, no scrolling wheel, and nothing that needs a fingertip small enough to require taking a glove off.

That is the floor, and for a lot of golfers it is the whole feature. Everything beyond the stroke count stays out of the way until you ask for it.

If you do want the detail, the follow-up is three short pages: fairway, green in regulation, then putts, with penalties folded onto the putts page rather than earning a step of their own. Each page is a row of buttons, not a form. Two shortcuts keep it quick. On a par 3 the fairway question never appears. And the putt count arrives pre-filled with an estimate derived from your score, the par, and whether you hit the green, so on the common holes you are confirming a number rather than choosing one.

There is also a single-form mode, off by default, that puts the score and the detail on one screen and commits them in one save.

The four extras worth having

Four fields do most of the work, and each exists because it changes a decision rather than because it looks good on a card.

Putts. Recorded per hole, not just as a round total, which is what makes the three-putt count possible. A putt count cannot exceed the strokes on the hole, and the app will not let you record one that does.

Fairway hit. Not a yes or no. You record where the ball finished: fairway, left, right, short, or out of bounds, with an option to mark the hole not applicable. The direction is the point. Seven misses that all leak right is a plan you can act on next week, and a bare percentage hides it completely.

Green in regulation. A straight yes or no on whether you reached the putting surface with two strokes left for par. ParPath sanity checks it against your strokes and putts, so a green in regulation the arithmetic says was impossible gets caught rather than quietly corrupting your stats. Chipping in from off the green does not count as a green hit, and the app knows that too. What a green in regulation is covers the definition in full.

Penalties. A count per hole, on the same page as putts. The field that repays itself fastest, because penalty strokes are the cheapest thing in golf to remove and almost nobody knows their real number until they count it.

Beyond those four the card holds first putt distance, greenside chips, bunker shots, and a note per hole. All optional. A field you never fill in is stored as untracked rather than as a zero, so it never drags a percentage around.

How many holes you are playing

You choose this when the round starts, and the choice follows the round the whole way through: the scorecard, the totals, the handicap estimate, and the stats.

The back nine case matters more than it sounds. A card that renumbers holes 10 to 18 as 1 to 9 makes your hole history useless: the eleventh you keep making a mess of gets filed under the second, and every course-specific pattern blurs.

The double loop becomes a genuine 18-hole round with 18 scored holes, and the par doubles with it, so it compares properly against your other 18s.

Nine-hole courses are first class

A nine-hole course in ParPath is a nine-hole course. Not an 18-hole course with half the card hidden, and nothing downstream treats it as a half-finished round.

What that means on the parts that are easy to get wrong:

• The scorecard has nine holes. Not eighteen with nine greyed out, and no phantom back nine to scroll past.
• The handicap estimate accepts it. A 9-hole round needs at least 7 holes scored, against 14 on an 18-hole round, and its differential is scaled to compare fairly with your 18s. The handicap tracking page covers that scaling.
• The stats normalise rather than average. Scoring averages are expressed against par rather than as a raw total, so a nine and an eighteen sit on the same scale.
• game plans nine holes. A nine-hole course gets nine hole strategies, each marked Green to attack, Yellow to manage, or Red to survive against the score you are chasing.

This reads as housekeeping until you are the person who plays a nine-hole course every Tuesday and has watched software quietly discount that golf.

Scoring for the whole group

Add everyone you are playing with and one card carries them all, each player with their own hole-by-hole scores rather than a shared running total.

Two ways to get people onto that card. One person can keep everybody's scores, which is how most groups already work. Or the round can issue a short join code that others open by link or QR, after which they score themselves from their own phone into the same round. A partner without the app can take a slot and score through a browser session.

Scores carry the identity of whoever last wrote them, and each player's own scores feed their own handicap estimate and stats. Joining a friend's round never leaks their score into your record.

On top of the card, a round can run a game: stroke play, match play, skins, Nassau, or Stableford, with handicaps applied or not. Standings update as scores arrive, so the argument on the eighteenth green is about the putt rather than the arithmetic. Golf formats explained covers those games if the names are new.

Two smaller settings. A round can start on any hole, for a shotgun start where your first hole is the fourteenth. And scores can be hidden during play, so the group finds out where it stands at the end rather than on every tee.

The round on your Lock Screen

On an iPhone that supports Live Activities and has them turned on, a round in progress can sit on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island: your score to par, the hole you are on, who is leading, the distance to the front, middle, and back of the green when GPS is running, and the ParPath colour and target for the hole.

The value is that glancing at a locked phone is socially free in a way that unlocking and opening an app is not.

It runs on a physical iPhone with Live Activities supported and turned on. It is a display surface, not the scorecard, so scores are still entered in the app.

Rounds you enter after the fact

Not every round gets scored while you play it, and pretending otherwise is how a record ends up with three months missing.

A round can be entered afterwards in three shapes: hole by hole from a paper card, as a nine-hole result, or as a single total. Rounds are marked by how they were captured, so one played through the app and one typed in on Sunday night stay distinguishable rather than silently blended. Totals still feed the handicap estimate using the holes-played count recorded on them, though a round entered as one number cannot contribute putts, fairways, or greens.

Any round can also be excluded from the handicap estimate by hand, for the scramble where you never played your own ball, or kept off the friend feed without deleting it.