How It Works

A walkthrough of BogeyHunter — The Tracker

1. Install the Desktop App

Download the desktop installer for your platform and run it. The bundled AI model ships inside the installer — no extra account, no first-run download, no internet during model setup. On first launch:

• The bundled AI loads into memory. Hardware acceleration is auto-detected; CPU is a supported baseline.
• Round data is stored locally and encrypted at rest. There’s no master password to set up — The Tracker doesn’t log in to third-party sites on your behalf.
• Hardware floor: 4 GB RAM, no GPU required.

2. Pair Your iPhone

Pairing the iPhone companion is a one-time, ~3-second operation:

• Open the iPhone app and tap Pair with Mac/PC.
• The desktop displays a single static QR code.
• Scan the QR. The iPhone and desktop establish a private trust between just those two devices. Done.
• Sync runs over your home Wi-Fi, signed and verified end-to-end. No cloud, no relay server, no key escrow.

The iPhone does not require the Mac/PC to function — you can run the iPhone app standalone and pair later. The desktop is the source of truth for round data when both are paired.

3. Log a Round

Round entry is built around the foursome. At round start, choose participants:

• Primary participant — you. Full metric suite tracked: strokes, putts, fairways with miss direction, GIR, OOB, penalties, sand saves, up-and-downs, club off the tee.
• Guests — up to 3 additional players. Strokes and putts only, fast enough to enter mid-round without slowing play. Frequent friends autocomplete by name.
• Per-tee selection — each player can play different tees in the same round. Yardages adjust accordingly in any handicap-relative calculations.

Hole-by-hole entry is tap-and-swipe optimized. Primary metrics at the top, guests cycle through quickly. Save the round when you finish; it syncs to the desktop next time both devices are on the same network.

Photo-to-Scorecard Shortcut

If you finished on a paper card, snap a photo. Apple’s on-device text recognition reads the numbers and pre-fills the digital scorecard for review. The source image is discarded after recognition. No images are uploaded to any server.

4. Set Up the Tee Time Hunter

From the desktop’s Hunter page:

• Add the courses you actually play.
• For each one, set the dates, time windows, and party size that matter to you.
• Pick how often you want the Hunter to check.
• When something opens up, tap through to the course’s booking site to lock it in. You always complete the reservation yourself — The Tracker doesn’t book on your behalf.

Live Activity on Your iPhone

When the Hunter finds new openings on your watched courses, your iPhone shows a Live Activity summarizing what’s available. Tap a slot to jump to the course’s booking site and complete the reservation yourself.

iPhone 14 Pro and later get a Dynamic Island summary while the Live Activity is active. Notifications come from your own paired desktop — there is no third-party push relay, and no booking-site credentials or scoring data are sent.

5. Watch the KPIs Trend

The desktop’s Dashboard is where the analytics live:

• Rolling 5-round averages for score, putts per round, putts per GIR.
• GIR percentage, fairway accuracy with miss-direction breakdown, scrambling rate, sand saves.
• Per-club performance trends, derived from the “club off tee” data captured on the scorecard.
• Per-course history — scoring distribution, best/worst, course-fit score.

The dashboards stay smooth even on a low-spec machine. The bundled on-device AI writes the narrative around the numbers (e.g. “your putting has been the bottleneck the last three rounds”) — classical math computes the numbers themselves, so the stats you see are the stats you’d compute by hand.

6. Friends and Head-to-Head

The desktop’s Friends section turns playing partners into first-class entities. Each frequent friend gets a profile page with:

• Their round history with you
• Average score, improvement trend, scoring distribution
• Head-to-head record vs. the primary user

These richer analytics are derived from the minimal score+putt entries you captured on the scorecard. They cost you nothing extra to capture.

Privacy Note on Friends

Guest data is the user’s tracked record of a friend’s game, kept locally on the user’s device. There is no authenticated “friend account” — this is single-user-perspective tracking, like a paper handicap card you keep on your friends. No cloud, no friend-sharing API, no social graph.

7. Sync, Backup, and Delete

Round data lives on the desktop, encrypted at rest. The iPhone keeps its own local copy, protected by the device’s file-level encryption while locked. Sync over your home Wi-Fi reconciles the two when both are on the same network; the desktop is the source of truth on conflict.

• Backup: back up the desktop’s data directory like any other local file. There is no cloud backup option by design.
• Export: rounds and scorecards can be exported as JSON or CSV for your own archival.
• Delete: uninstall the desktop app or iPhone app to remove all data permanently. There is nothing on any server to delete — because there is no server.

Run Standalone or Together

The Tracker doesn’t require both surfaces. You can:

• Run only the iPhone app for on-course scorecard and OCR — no desktop needed.
• Run only the desktop for KPIs and the Tee Time Hunter — no iPhone needed.
• Run both and pair them — the recommended setup, where the iPhone is the on-course capture surface and the desktop is the analytics brain.