FairwayData is your personal, offline-capable golf diary. This page explains in detail how each part of the app works, as a companion to the short help screen inside the app itself.
1. First-time setup
- On first launch, a short setup wizard walks you through three steps: your continent, whether and with which home country you want to share community ratings, and the search radius for nearby golf courses.
- You can reopen the wizard at any time via the corresponding button on the home screen.
- Every choice you make there can later be changed individually in Settings.
2. Fairway Radar
- Finds golf courses near you directly on the map – using your GPS location or by freely panning the map.
- Tap a course marker for details such as address, website, phone number, and opening hours, where available in the map data. Phone number and website are tappable.
- From there you can jump straight into logging a round or rating that course, without having to search for the club manually first.
3. Overview
- The central entry point for browsing instead of creating new entries: rounds, ratings, playing partners, photos, reports and statistics – all in one place, reachable via a tile on the home screen.
4. Golf Courses & data corrections
- An offline-capable golf course database based on OpenStreetMap, which you download by continent or country. In countries with very many courses (e.g. the USA), an extra region step (state/province) first narrows the list down.
- For German courses there's additionally DGV course data (course rating, slope, tees). If community-maintained scorecard data is also available for a course, it takes priority over the DGV data; if it's missing, the app automatically falls back to DGV.
- If a course is missing from the database entirely, you can add it manually.
- Every course has a report with your past ratings for it, which you can export as a PDF.
- How can I correct the data for a golf course?
- Tap a golf course marker on the map to open the detail sheet. If the course was found in the local database, tap the "Edit OSM" button.
- In the OSM course editor that opens, you can adjust data such as club name, number of holes, green fee, opening hours, or contact details.
- Tapping "Submit change to OSM & save locally" applies the change directly to your local database and also submits it as a structured note to OpenStreetMap.
- Why aren't some courses updated on OpenStreetMap right away?
- OpenStreetMap notes are reviewed by the community. Your submitted data serves as a verified pointer for local mappers, who then incorporate it into the main map. Your local app applies the changes immediately though, so you don't need to wait for approval.
- How do I use the map editor?
- Every input field has a handy "X" icon that lets you quickly clear its content.
- The form deliberately can't be dismissed by swiping down, to prevent unsaved input from being lost by accident. Use the close button in the top left instead.
5. Logging a round & scorecard scan
- Start by picking the club you played – via search, through Fairway Radar, or from your recently played courses.
- Only the date is required; everything else is optional: notes, photos, and up to three playing partners.
- Optionally, you can also log the score for a round: strokes and putts per hole, course rating, slope, total length, and your handicap index – the app then automatically calculates your Stableford target per hole as well as gross and net points.
- If a course doesn't have tee data yet, you can share your entries (tee, course rating, slope, length, par) anonymously with other players. The “Share tee data with other players” switch only appears for 18-hole rounds with complete, plausible entries and is switched on by default in the settings (can be switched off there or for each round). We review the data before it is published; no photos, scores or personal data are transmitted.
- You can optionally enter the costs of each round (green fee, cart, trolley, rental bag; amount and currency, marked as a discount/member price if needed). They are saved in your round and - if “Share prices” is on in the settings - assigned anonymously to the club. In the club info, the “Cart & prices” card shows guide values from all players' anonymous reports; use “Report cart or prices” to contribute yourself.
- Photographing your scorecard instead of typing it in
- Instead of entering each hole's values by hand, you can take a photo of your filled-in paper scorecard and have it read automatically. You get to choose between two ways:
- Automatic scan: the photo is uploaded to our server and analyzed there using an AI connection (Anthropic Claude); the detected values are returned straight to the app for your review. This service costs us money on an ongoing basis, so past a certain amount of monthly use we show a friendly nudge toward the Tip Jar (see the "Support" section) – there's no hard cutoff though.
- Manual, with your own AI app: alternatively, you can have the photo analyzed yourself using an AI app of your choice (e.g. the Claude or ChatGPT app); a ready-made prompt in the app lets you conveniently copy the instructions and photo into that app, then paste the result back into FairwayData.
- In both cases, the detected hole and stroke data is shown to you once more for review and correction before saving – nothing is taken over automatically without your check. See the Privacy Policy for details on how the photo is handled.
- If a number wasn't recognized or you want to correct it, the stroke counter starts from that hole's par rather than always starting at 1 – so you don't have to count all the way up from 1 on a par 5.
6. Rating a club
- Rate every course you've played across several categories – condition, layout, value for money, service, catering, greens, fairways and bunkers – and add a comment.
7. Top courses & community
- Optionally share your ratings anonymously with the community and compare them with other users' ratings – either right in a course's report as "What others say", or in the worldwide "Top courses worldwide" leaderboard, filterable by continent and country.
- You decide for yourself whether each individual rating is shared; your home country and the default for this can be adjusted in Settings.
- Shared ratings can be set back to private again at any time – individually or all at once. See the Privacy Policy for more.
8. Rounds, trips, ratings, playing partners, photos
- Rounds: all logged rounds with date, notes, photos and playing partners – as a list or in a calendar, groupable and searchable. Use the suitcase icon to combine several rounds into a trip.
- Trips: manually combine several rounds into a trip – e.g. a weekend getaway or a golf trip abroad. You pick the time range and the rounds yourself; the app deliberately does not detect trips automatically. Every trip gets its own report under Reports.
- Ratings: all submitted ratings in one place, groupable by year, month or course, and searchable.
- Playing Partners: manage your playing partners – added manually or imported from Contacts. For each partner you see every round you've played together along with the average rating, as well as your favorite and most frequently played partner. Duplicate entries with the same name can be merged.
- Photos: all photos from your rounds and ratings in one place, searchable by course name and filterable by year, month and day.
9. Statistics & reports
- Statistics: an overview of the key numbers in your golf diary: number of rounds, ratings, playing partners and photos, a geographic breakdown by country, continent and state/region, leaderboards of your most-played and best-rated courses and partners, plus trend charts. Almost every tile leads straight to the matching detail view.
- Reports: finished, shareable reports instead of running numbers – the year review summarizes a calendar year, the trip report summarizes one of your trips, each with a rating breakdown, courses played and playing partners (without their personal rating). Optionally exportable as a PDF, with photos of your choosing attached.
10. Support
- FairwayData is free and ad-free. This section lets you optionally leave a small donation via PayPal, or rate the app on the App Store.
- You'll also find a transparent breakdown there of the ongoing costs the app incurs (Apple Developer Program, server hosting, the AI connection for the scorecard scan).
11. Your data
- All entries are stored locally on your device and automatically synced across your devices via iCloud, provided iCloud is enabled.
- For details on location data, OpenStreetMap submissions, community ratings, and the AI-powered scorecard scan, see the Privacy Policy.