Fairway: Live Golf Scoring

Your group is on the 7th, theirs is on the 3rd, and the leaderboard stays honest about it. Share a six-character code and everyone's scores land as they post them.

Score a round together, even when you are holes apart.

Group scoring apps assume everyone is standing on the same tee. Real golf does not work like that — you are on the 7th, the pair behind you is on the 3rd, and somebody joined at the turn. Fairway is built around that. There is no shared turn, nobody advances the group, and no one waits.

SHARE A CODE, NOT AN INVITATION Start a round and you get six characters. Read them out across the tee box or text them to the group. Anyone can join with the code, at any point in the round — they get a card starting on the hole they are standing on, and the holes behind them stay blank rather than counting as zeroes.

NOBODY IS BEHIND FOR TEEING OFF LATE Match play, skins and head-to-head compare only the holes both sides have actually finished. A player thru 12 against a player thru 3 is level after three, not nine up. Every row on the leaderboard shows how many holes it has played, because a score without that is meaningless when a group is spread across the course.

REAL COURSES, ANYWHERE Search 32,000 courses worldwide by name and pick your tee. Par, stroke index and yardage come from the published scorecard. Course rating and slope come from the tee you chose, split by gender where the course publishes both — which is what turns a handicap index into strokes on this course, allocated to the holes the stroke index says.

Plenty of clubs outside the United States are listed with no scorecard at all, and some are not listed anywhere. So Fairway never stops there: type the card in once — 9 or 18 holes, par and stroke index, rating and slope only if your card prints them — and the course is yours. Everyone who joins your round gets it automatically, because the scorecard travels with the round. Valderrama, a nine-hole golfklubb in Denmark, or your municipal track that no database has heard of, all play the same.

EVERY FORMAT, SCORED PROPERLY • Stroke play, gross and net • Stableford, standard and modified • Match play, with dormie and a real close-out — 3&2, not "3 up with 2 to play" • Skins, where a halved hole carries and doubles the next one • Best ball, best two, aggregate, scramble and alternate shot • More than two sides in match play becomes a Ryder Cup style round robin

Four-ball compares partners on net, because an 18-handicap's net 4 losing to a scratch player's gross 4 is not four-ball. A hole in skins is only settled once everyone has played it — two players tied on 4 is not a tie if a third is still standing over a putt for 3.

TEAMS YOU KEEP Your regular fourball, a society, a league. A team has its own code, its own roster and its own history, and you can start a round from one in a single tap.

STATS WORTH KEEPING Putts, fairways hit, greens in regulation and penalties, per hole. Par 3s are left out of the fairway count, because "missed the fairway" is not a thing that happened there.

BUILT FOR A COURSE WITH NO SIGNAL Scoring never waits on the network. Every score is written to your iPhone and shown immediately; sending it to the others happens afterwards and is allowed to fail. Walk out of coverage on the 12th, score five holes, and it catches up when you walk back in.

NO ACCOUNT No sign-in screen. No password, no email, no "continue with" button. Fairway asks for a name once and uses the iCloud account already on your iPhone to tell players apart — which is also what stops anyone else editing your card.

Requires iOS 18. Sharing a round needs iCloud switched on; without it, scoring, statistics and every format still work on your own phone.

Course data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0) via OpenGolfAPI.