Golfshot’s Auto Shot Tracking has quietly logged 374 million shots since 2020. With Auto Putt Tracking, the round now tracks itself from the first tee to the last tap-in — using only the Apple Watch you already wear.

Intro

There are two ways to build automatic shot tracking. You can put a sensor on every club and ask the golfer to buy, install, pair, and eventually replace them. Or you can teach a device the golfer already owns what a golf swing feels like.

We took the second path in 2020, and we’ve spent five years training it on real rounds. This is an honest look at how that approach compares with Arccos — the best-known sensor-based system — and what changes now that putts are part of it.

What each system asks of you

Both apps produce a shot-by-shot record of your round. The difference is almost entirely in what has to be true before that record exists.

What ends up in your bag

This is the part that’s easy to underestimate until the season starts. A sensor-based system is fifteen small pieces of hardware you own, charge nothing but manage forever — each one paired to a specific club, each one a thing that can be lost with a regrip.

Sensors are a genuinely good idea, and Arccos has built a strong product on them. They know exactly which club you pulled, because the club told them. Our bet in 2020 was that a wrist-worn accelerometer, given enough real swings to learn from, could infer the same things without asking the golfer to change anything about their equipment.

Three hundred and seventy-four million shots is what that bet looks like five years in. Every one of them made the model a little better at telling a full swing from a practice swing, a chip from a waggle, a shot from a bumpy cart path.

Three years of tracking, priced out

Hardware is a one-time cost; the subscription isn’t. Here’s the arithmetic over a typical three-year stretch, assuming you already own an Apple Watch.

The last piece was always putting

Full swings are the loud part of a round and the easy part to detect. Putts are neither. A putting stroke is small, slow, and easily confused with picking up a ball or lining up a read — which is exactly why it’s the stroke golfers forget to log, and why nearly half of a scorecard has historically gone unrecorded.

Auto Putt Tracking closes that gap. Reach the green, set the pin, and every putt is counted with its distance and rolled into your score. Lag putts, tap-ins, and the Texas wedge from just off the fringe all count. No tapping, no club sensor, no phone out of the bag.

With putts in the record, the dataset is complete for the first time. That means Strokes Gained across driving, approach, short game, and putting from a single round — the four-category picture that used to require either a launch monitor and a coach, or a bag full of sensors.

And because the data collects itself, it’s honest. Nobody rounds a 6 down to a 5 when they aren’t the one doing the counting.

Where this goes

Auto Putt Tracking makes Golfshot the first and only Apple Watch app delivering fully automatic tee-to-green tracking with no other devices needed. That’s a milestone, not a finish line. Every round played adds to the same body of swing data that got us here, and the model keeps getting sharper on the hard cases — punch shots, awkward lies, half wedges, the strokes that decide your round.

If you already wear an Apple Watch, there is nothing to buy, nothing to install, and nothing to remember. Turn it on and play.

Sources: Golfshot Auto Putt Tracking launch announcement (Golf Genius, 2026); Golfshot Auto Shot Tracking announcement (2021); golfshot.com support documentation; arccosgolf.com product pages and published Arccos Caddie reviews, accessed August 2026. Arccos and Arccos Caddie are trademarks of Arccos Golf LLC. Apple Watch is a trademark of Apple Inc. Handicap Index® is a registered mark of the USGA.