The PGA Tour Has A New App For Playing Golf, And It's Great Except For One Thing

If you like golf even a little bit, and you have a smartphone, you definitely should be using an app for keeping track of your scores and measuring distances on the course.

Compared to dedicated range finders, smartphone apps are easy to use. Plus, they keep track of all your stats like putts, fairways hit, greens in regulation, scrambling, and much more. After the round you can nerd out, breaking down what you did right and did wrong, so you know where your game needs work.

Until now, my favorite app for tracking on-course information has been Golfshot, a $30 app that gives yardages on almost every course I've ever played. (The lone exception was Streamsong in Florida, which was only a few months old when I played.)

The PGA Tour acquired the company that built Golfshot, Shotzoom, and developed a new app called TOURCaddie. It might be the best golf app on the market.

There's only one small problem — price. The app is $30 a year for the full suite of services. Golfshot, which still exists in the app store is a one-time fee of $30. You get a few more bells and whistles in TOURCaddie, but not that much more. I would still recommend Golfshot over TOURCaddie, as long as it's in the App Store, if price is your top concern.

Through a spokesperson, Ben Addoms at the PGA defended the new pricing, saying, "Having a subscription price ensures that the app is continuing to improve."

Craig Prichard, President of Shotzoom added, "The primary differentiator is the PGA TOUR-level instruction. All of the instruction is of the highest quality and is proven effective in both amateur and pro instruction. Additionally, the tips and drills are tied to individual performance, allowing for customized instruction that fits a golfer’s personal game."

These are nice add-ons, but personally, I tend to ignore instructional videos. I find they mess me up more than help. The only thing that really helps is personalized instruction from a pro. But, that's just me. If you like to read all the tips in golf magazines, and watch Golf Fix on Golf Channel, then you would love the videos built into the app.

The PGA flew me down to Florida to test the TOURCaddie app on TPC Sawgrass. You can read a recap of the excellent course, and my attempt to par the famous island green here.

I played with Travis Velichko, who leads business development for PGA Tour Experiences, a division of the tour that works on golf vacations, academies, and digital stuff like the TOURCaddie app.

He said the app, which has been out for just over a month, already has 400,000 downloads. Golfshot, which was out for years, was at 1.2 million downloads. So, TOURCaddie is off to a strong start.

Rather than describe all the features in the app, we have a slideshow that shows what it looks like and how it works.