Round Buddy came about as an idea during a casual golf game in Sydney Australia.
We had tried various golfing apps that were very feature-rich and included functionality such as accurate ‘distance-to-pin’ and other components. These apps were also very expensive and as casual golfers who played once a month, or even every six weeks, we couldn’t justify the expense.
So we developed Round Buddy, which is essentially a digital scorecard app that makes it easy to enter scores during a game, and also makes it easy to share and track scores within a ‘Buddy Group’. We also looked at what other features casual golfers would need to make their game more enjoyable over time, so we included:
- Groups. The ability to create various ‘Buddy Groups’ to make it easy to coordinate a game. With a few clicks you can invite your group to a game and send them an email and calendar invitation for a particular date.
- Rich data capture during the game. This includes the ability to collect data such as the number of putts and the tee result (fairway, green or rough) for each hole to assist in future performance analysis.
- Performance tracking graphs. As a player continues to play, vital details such as scores, no of putts, handicap level and stableford points are all added to a tracking graph to give the player a good idea of how they are improving over time.
- Ability to add any course. As there are millions of golf courses around the world it was prohibitive to add all of them. So we added the ability for players to add their own course by scanning the paper score card with their phone.
- Stableford scoring. We found that stableford scoring is well suited to casual golfers, but most groups avoid it in favor of stroke play because of the calculations involved to take into account handicaps and stroke indexes. So we simplified these calculations in app so that players can easily get their stableford scores as they play.
- AI Insights. We decided that there is a lot of insight that you can get from information such as no of strokes, no of putts, and tee results over time that could impact a player’s future game strategy and training plan. So we included an AI Insights function that can help point players in the right direction.
There are also features we consciously decided to leave out of Round Buddy. This includes GPS tracking and information such as ‘distance to hole’ at any point. We decided that these are ‘nice to haves’, but there are plenty of more expensive and feature-rich apps that do this well and would be more suited to more serious golfers who play in regular competitions and more than once a week.
Our remit is to provide an app that is affordable and easy to use for casual players, so that they can enjoy the game and keep track of their improvement over time. We hope you enjoy Round Buddy and welcome any feedback on what you would like to see included in the App.