PuttView App Review: Could Augmented Reality Transform Your Green-Reading Skills?

Green reading is one of the most underrated skills in golf. You can hit putts with the perfect line and pace but if you’ve not assessed the slopes correctly, the ball won’t go in. It’s as simple as that.

There are more and more Augmented Reality green reading apps becoming available to download, although none carry as much weight as PuttView - a brand well known for its game-changing visual technology associated with putt mapping and making practice more fun and effective.

The emergence of these apps stems from being able to utilise the iPhone Pro’s built-in LiDAR sensors to scan the green, map its contours and project real-time data in seconds. I tested the PuttView app to see how it works and what practical benefit it can have for the everyday golfer.

Like on the best golf iPhone apps, the process is as idiot-proof as it can be. Download it then follow the on-screen prompts and within seconds you’ll be staring at the ideal line of your putt. The process involves traversing the terrain of your putt for the green to be scanned on putts longer than around 10 feet, marking the position of the hole, then walking back to mark the position of the ball (up to 20 feet away). The app then projects the roll path, target start line and distance.

You have a host of different viewing options and settings to make the read more accurate or display it in a way that works for your brain interprets visual information. You can adjust the distance past the hole and stimp reading, which affects how much the ball will break.

From there, you can switch between display modes including break arrows with percentages, a speed line, ideal line, aiming line, gate trainer and a pro read.

In the settings you can choose between various options like animations, corridors, or markers and adjust color, thickness, and brightness to match your green and your eye. The app also allows you to select the putt values that matter to you from 18 available stats. Save your visual preferences as a set and return to your exact setup every time you practice.

My experience using the PuttView app was a very positive one. Most people under read putts and I can see how an app like this might help people realise the amount of break required and the angle from which the ball enters the hole.

It allows you to quantify reads, which is invaluable feedback on how you interpret slope. If you use Aimpoint, you can correlate slope percentages with what you feel in your feet to really dial in your senses and get feedback (although a digital spirit level will arguably do this more accurately).

You can also see how breaks change as the stimp readings go up or down and then get feedback on how good you are at matching your start line with your aim.

So there’s plenty of positives, but there were some niggly aspects I didn’t like. The first being - if you want to see how your putting performance matches the read, you’ll need a tripod (unless you can convince a friend to hold your phone steady behind you while you putt), which is sure to turn some heads on a busy practice putting green. It’s also only available on iPhone Pro phones from the 12 model onwards, which limits the scope somewhat.

The second thing and arguably most important complaint I had from a pretty exhaustive testing session is the accuracy of the reads. This may in part come down to not knowing what the stimp reading on a particular day is (although for most golfers this information is not usually readily available) so it involves some guesswork when it came to inputting this important value here.

But from my testing, the PuttView app generally under-read around 50% of putts for me to differing degrees. I was hitting putts that started higher than the ideal line, missed on the low side and finished the correct foot distance past the hole. This isn’t ideal given what I said at the start about most golfers under-reading putts, if anything I’d prefer the app to be over-reading them.

There are some mitigating factors here - potential error in stimp reading, the grain of the grass, the fact it’s winter and the greens were moist - the list goes on. I’d like to test the app again on a normal dry day during peak season - I would guess my results might be slightly different and more accurate.

It must also be said that the basic features of the app are free but a $9.99 monthly subscription is required to unlock some of the more interesting features like the full green map, pro-Level visuals, deep data dive and the fully customizable display.

Ultimately, if you struggle with your putting or think you’re hitting good putts that just don’t go in, using the PuttView app is a good way to get feedback on your reads. The appeal is somewhat limited given it can’t be used easily during a round and is not legal for competition play, but if you’re a keen practicer looking to improve in the area of the game we can all get better at, it’s worth a try.