Questions & answers

Optivo lets you log a round at four depths:

• Record — enter a finished scorecard, all holes at once. Fastest way to log a past round.
• Core — your score, hole by hole, with a simple stepper.
• Basic — score plus putts and fairways in regulation.
• Full — shot-by-shot tracking with lie, distance and penalties. This is the only mode that unlocks Strokes Gained.

Pick the mode that fits how much time and attention you have. You can mix modes across your history — they all feed your scoring trends and handicap.

Strokes Gained answers "how good was that shot, really?" From any spot on the course there's an expected number of strokes to hole out. If your shot leaves you better off than expected, you gained strokes; worse off, you lost them. Add it up over a round and you can see exactly where your scoring came from.

Optivo compares your shots to a PGA Tour baseline and reports the totals across four areas: Off the Tee, Approach, Short Game and Putting.

A positive number in a category means you're gaining strokes there versus the baseline; a negative number means you're giving strokes back. The most negative category is usually the best place to spend your practice time.

Optivo also breaks approach and putting down by distance, so you can pinpoint the exact range that's costing you — for example, mid-irons from 150–175 yards, or putts inside ten feet.

Yes. Strokes Gained needs to know what happened on each shot — the lie and the distance — and only Full mode captures that. Record, Core and Basic rounds still count toward your scoring trends and handicap, but they don't produce SG analysis. The more Full rounds you log, the more dependable your SG picture becomes.

By default Optivo measures you against a tour-level baseline, which is great for seeing where you stand against elite play. The "vs You" baseline instead compares a round to your own typical performance. It's the better lens for tracking improvement — it tells you whether today was a good day for your game, not Rory's.

Optivo implements the full World Handicap System (WHS) on your device. For each round it calculates a score differential from your score, the course rating and the slope rating. It then takes the best 8 of your most recent 20 qualifying rounds and averages them.

On top of that it applies the WHS safeguards: net double bogey capping on blow-up holes, the soft and hard caps that limit how fast your index can rise, and exceptional score reduction when you play far below your index. A progression chart shows the whole thing moving over time.

Yes. The WHS defines adjusted tables for smaller sample sizes — for instance, using fewer than the best 8 differentials when you don't yet have 20 rounds. Optivo follows those rules, so you get a meaningful, evolving index from your earliest rounds. The number simply becomes more stable as your history grows.

Your rounds, notes and stats live in your own private iCloud, using Apple's CloudKit. There's no Optivo account to create and no Optivo server collecting your scores. We don't run an analytics backend that harvests your personal data.

Because it's your iCloud, your data syncs automatically and privately between your iPhone and iPad, and it's covered by Apple's account security. See the privacy policy for the full detail.

Yes, automatically. As long as you're signed into the same iCloud account with iCloud Drive enabled, Optivo keeps your data in step across your iPhone and iPad. There's nothing to set up — log a round on one device and it appears on the other. Sync timing depends on your network and iCloud, so give it a moment if a device has been offline.

Optivo discovers courses through Apple Maps, so most established courses show up when you search or look nearby. If a course isn't listed — a new layout, a quiet local track, somewhere remote — you can drop a pin to create a custom course at that exact location and use it like any other.

Course details are saved onto each round, so your history stays accurate even if a map listing later changes.

Either. Optivo can display distances in imperial (yards) or metric (metres), and the choice applies everywhere distances appear, including shot tracking and the distance-based Strokes Gained breakdowns.

From a round you can export two things as plain text: a clean scorecard, or an AI-generated coach report that summarises how the round went in everyday language. Because both are text, you can drop them straight into Messages, WhatsApp, email — wherever you'd share with a playing partner or coach.

Notes are for the things a scorecard can't hold — swing thoughts, what the greens were doing, a takeaway from a lesson. Add labels to keep them organised, and link a note to a specific round so the context travels with it. The global search covers notes, labels and rounds together.

Optivo is a native iOS app built for recent iPhones and iPads (iOS 26 and later). For sync, you'll want to be signed into iCloud with iCloud Drive on. Course discovery uses location while you're finding a course; you can decline location and add courses by pin-drop instead.

You can track rounds offline — handy out on the course where signal can be patchy. iCloud sync and Apple Maps course discovery need a connection, so anything that hasn't synced yet will catch up automatically the next time you're online.