I Tested The Smart Caddie App For Five Rounds And It Blew Me Away

Everybody needs a distance measuring device of some sort and the benefits of tracking your shots on the course are well documented. But I’m not sure I’ve experienced a product that does both as conveniently as the Smart Caddie app.

Powered by the Golf Zon cloud, the Smart Caddie app is, as the name suggests, a smart watch app that works with iOS and Android devices to provide a host of strategy-enhancing features. I used it for multiple rounds at three different courses using my Apple Watch Series 9 to properly put it through its paces - is it one of the best golf GPS apps money can buy?

First things first, you have to pair the app on the watch with the app on your accompanying smartphone - simple enough. To get the most out of the Smart Caddie, you also need to make sure all your Health settings are enabled - again, no big deal.

Get to the course and open up the Smart Caddie app on your watch. Hit play and for me, the course appeared within seconds. Hit select and everything will come to life once you get to the first tee.

The level of detail this app goes into is genuinely mind blowing, and it’s presented in a way that is both readable and accessible on what is a relatively small screen. The opening screen displays the front, middle and back yardages as well as an aerial view of the hole. Other information shown includes the hole number, par, score, the time and how many shots have been tracked.

That last point may have taken you aback. But that’s right, the app automatically tracks your shot locations for you! And it does it very effectively, without the need for any sensors in your clubs. Previous experiences with other shot trackers has proven hit and miss, with shots often being missed - but Smart Caddie never missed one, nor did it add one erroneously.

While it doesn’t track putts, when you finish each hole the watch will vibrate and you’re greeted with a screen where you can manually confirm your score and the number of putts taken. Try not to miss it as you can’t then edit that score until after your round on your phone. The app also doubles as a simple but effective GPS app with touch screen targeting and aerial photos of holes rather than graphical representations.

Back to the playing of each hole - if you tap the screen with your finger you get a full view of the hole with a touch distance feature, which lets you see the distance to the place you want to get to or avoid. This really came in handy when trying to hit to the fat part of the fairway, or seeing how far it was around doglegs where a rangefinder cannot provide the line of sight measurement.

On approach shots, if you swipe your finger up you can view the green undulation feature. This is essentially a heat map (red is the high spots, blue is the low) that gives you a flavour of the general slope of the green. Some of the subtle breaks were missing on the courses I played, and it’s not available for every course (but most will have it), but it certainly helps you understand the side to miss if you want to keep your ball below the hole.

There were some other cool features that really came in handy. The first being the live distance measurement, so once you’ve tracked your tee shot and move towards your ball, the distance will count up in real time. It was really useful to know how far you hit your driver on a given day or course - distances can change drastically depending on the firmness of the ground or the strength of the wind, so to know how far you really hit it on the course that day should inform better strategy for the rest of the round.

It also helps when you’ve hit your ball in the thick rough and are trying to determine roughly how far up the hole it went in order to locate it, providing you know how far you hit each club!

If you do, you can enter them in the smartphone app before your round and the watch app will then provide club recommendations for each shot. The distances can even factor changes in elevation, providing another layer of accuracy that not many other watch app are capable of.

One I didn't try was the swing practice feature, which lets you analyse the tempo of your swing by timing the backswing and downswing - which could be handy prior to your round to establish your optimum rhythm, if you know it.

After your round, the stats sync automatically to your phone and you can review or edit your score and shot locations. You can even add the clubs hit for each shot, which will then populate your actual club distances for better club choices next time round.

You get some basic data points like putts taken and greens in regulation, which tallied pretty well with the shots that were tracked.

All of the features I experienced (and thoroughly enjoyed) come with a subscription cost of either $9.99 a month, $49.99 a year or $129.99 for three years. How much you play and commit to the app long term will determine the value for money here but assuming you already own a compatible watch, the price seems very appealing to me.

In all honesty, I’m not familiar with many apps that do as much as this one so comprehensively - especially tracking shots automatically and factoring slope - these are two huge pluses when it comes to the proposition of Smart Caddie.