This is the one that changes what Golfshot can tell you. Once it knows what’s in your bag, it starts learning how far you actually hit each club — not the number on the shaft, the number you carry it on a Tuesday in July. After a few rounds the caddie stops guessing and starts recommending your 7 iron because it has seen your 7 iron.

Settings › Equipment, about a minute. Nothing downstream works properly without it: club recommendations can’t suggest a club Golfshot doesn’t know you carry, and your distances have nowhere to accumulate.

A handicap is the only honest measure of whether you’re getting better, because it strips out the course, the tees and the weather. Link your GHIN Number under Settings › Handicap and every round you score posts itself — adjusted for net double bogey, no second app, no arithmetic on the drive home. You also get a real number to play matches off, and the strokes show up on your scorecard where they belong.

Don’t have one? Golfshot sends you to the USGA to get set up. It’s the step new golfers skip most often, and the one that turns a pile of scores into a number that actually means something.

Playing from the watch keeps you in the round. Yardages arrive with a glance instead of a dig through the bag, scores go in while you walk, and the group behind you stops sighing. Roughly half of all Golfshot rounds now start on a wrist rather than a phone.

Playing from the watch is free — GPS yardages, scoring, the lot. What Pro adds on Apple Watch Series 8 or newer is Auto Shot Tracking: shots and putts detected from your swing, with nothing screwed into your clubs, which means a complete shot-by-shot record of the round without you doing anything to record it. That record is what everything in step five runs on.

Add your group at round setup and one card covers the whole foursome — nobody’s scribbling on a paper scorecard, nobody’s arguing about the 14th on the drive home, and net scores work themselves out if you’re playing a match.

It’s the least technical item on this list and one of the most useful. Golf is a social game, and the app is better when it keeps up with the whole group rather than just you.

This is the feature that actually makes you better.

Strokes Gained tells you where the round was won or lost across driving, approach, short game and putting, measured against a benchmark instead of against par. It almost always contradicts your instincts. Most golfers walk off blaming the putter; the numbers usually point at approach play. Knowing that is the difference between an hour on the practice green and an hour hitting 150-yard wedges — which is to say, the difference between practising and practising the right thing.

You’ll find it on its own dashboard, with a total against a benchmark and a breakdown by category. Green Maps are the in-round version of the same idea — slope and contour on the green in front of you, so a long putt starts on the right line. Read the green before you putt, read the Strokes Gained after the round.