If you’re like us, you love golf tech nearly as much as you love the game itself. For those who are into wearables and golf apps, this news may be very much of interest to you. Earlier this month, Google held its annual I/O developer conference where the company showed off the latest and greatest software advances coming to its ever-expanding suite of services.
While AI took center stage, there were hundreds of updates and announcements around other products including Google’s wearable platform Wear OS. In a chat titled “What’s new in Health on Android,” there was one quick blurb that should get us golfers very excited. The mention was brief but it focused specifically on swing tracking from Wear OS. You can see the quick mention in the video below.
Now, we already have a handful of Wear OS golf apps such as 18Birdies that give you basic game tracking abilities without the need to pick up your phone after every stroke. Most of these apps, however, require manual user input to track game play. The update to Wear OS 4 later this year will give app developers the ability to add shot tracking that will utilize sensors on the watch itself. This will give golf apps the ability to detect shot types in real time. Your watch will be able to differentiate between full swings, chip shots, putts, and hopefully more.
Why it matters
Tracking swing types won’t be of much use on its own but this opens the door to some very interesting possibilities for golf applications. If you take and app like 18Birdies that uses GPS location and a slew of other data for game tracking, the ability to track shot type could result in an on-watch applications that can track your strokes and distances which would allow it to keep score for you completely hands-free.
Of course, this will be on the app developers to utilize these new data sets. Still, it’s exciting to know that eventually, you could track your entire round completely hands free so you can focus entirely on your game. Who knows? As hardware improves, this could eventually lead to game improvement applications that give you suggestions on how to fix or improve your swing in real time, as you play. That’s some very exciting stuff. Wear OS 4 is slated for release later this year and we’ll be keeping an eye out for any golf-specific updates that arrive with it. Stay tunes.