We’ve got you.

Certus is free to download. One annual subscription, bought through Apple, includes everything. The iPad Coach Station is free, and an iPad opens the full app when it’s signed in to a subscribed Certus account or uses the same Apple Account as a subscribed iPhone.

iPhone and iPad on iOS and iPadOS 27 or later, and Apple Watch. Accuracy mode needs an iPhone with LiDAR; the highest frame rates depend on your iPhone’s camera. See the App Store listing for current requirements.

Body tracking runs on your iPhone, and a readout only appears when the camera angle can actually see that movement. If it can’t, Certus shows nothing rather than a guess. On iPhones with LiDAR, Accuracy mode adds depth so movement readouts are in true inches.

Every shot is scored against how many strokes a golfer at your chosen benchmark needs from that lie and distance. Tour baselines come from Mark Broadie’s published model; amateur levels come from measured shot-tracking data, and plus-handicap levels are estimated between scratch and Tour. You choose the yardstick: any whole handicap from Tour (+5) to 20, and on Coach, your own best rounds.

Yes, with Tournament-Legal Mode. Tap the T button on the map, or turn on Tournament Round in map settings. Plays-like, elevation, wind, slope, the caddie, club suggestions and Round Briefing are hidden, plain GPS distances stay, and the T button turns solid green so it’s obvious at a glance. Always check the terms of your competition.

No. Nothing is sent until you allow AI Features. After that, coaching, round recaps, briefings, course insights and Ask Coach send your rounds, shots and stats as text; AI Swing Review sends up to ten still frames from the clip; and scorecard scanning sends the card photo, including any names on it. Some coaching is written on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute instead. Your full video, account name and email are never sent. Every number on the coach’s cards and recaps is checked against your computed stats, and Ask the Coach checks every claim, before you see it. Turn it off any time with the AI Features switch in Profile.

Stand over your ball and tap + Shot. It logs where you are, with the club you usually hit from there (Putter on the green). For a few seconds a pill lets you change the club or add a penalty, and Undo on the toast removes a mis-tap. On the green, set your putts with − Putts +. If you’re standing on a different hole from the one on screen, Certus asks which hole the shot is on.

Tap the hole name at the bottom of the map to see every hole, then tap the one to fix. Tap the score circle, correct it and tap Save. A score marked “est” was worked out from your shots. Check it and tap Confirm.

Tap ••• → Add Missed Shot, then tap the map where the shot was played from; Certus slots it in by its distance to the pin. If it spots a gap itself, a banner says a shot looks missing. Tap Add to fill it in.

Tap •••, then End Round…, which gives you three choices. Save & End Round reviews and saves your card, Leave Open — Resume Later parks it (open the course again and tap Resume Round), and Discard Round deletes it. You can have one GPS round going at a time. For a short break, use Pause Round in map settings.

On the course page, choose Front 9 or Back 9 before you tap Play. A finished nine saves as a 9-hole round. For 18 starting elsewhere, tap Starting hole and pick Hole 10, or any hole for a shotgun start.

Tap the flag to zoom in, move the map until the marker sits on today’s hole location, and tap Set Pin. Yardages and the par-3 club pick then use the real flag, and the pin is saved with the round for the Approach by Pin Position stats. The tee works the same way with Set Tee.

Only from your own tracked shots: how far and how straight you really hit each club. Tap the club on the map to compare clubs: the score you’d expect with each, and on par 4s and 5s your real tee shots dropped onto this hole, with how often each finds the fairway, sand, water or trouble. A club needs a few tracked tee shots before it’s ranked.

Yes. Tap ••• → Show on Lock Screen. The banner shows your yardage and a Shot button; on the green it shows Pin (marks the flag where you stand) and a putts stepper.

Tap the yardage card, or turn on Simple View in map settings: front, center and back in big numbers, with the same Score and Shot buttons. Tap Map to go back.

The map yardage adjusted for elevation along the hole, the head or tail component of the wind, and air density from temperature, altitude and pressure.

The first time you open a course map, a short guide walks through each control: yardages, the caddie, flyover, green slope, wind, Tournament-Legal Mode and map settings, plus Round options during a round. To see it again, go to Profile → Tips & Tools → Replay Map Guide; it runs the next time you open a course.

Yes, if you download the course first. Open it and tap Download for Offline Play. Course Only keeps the layout, tees and elevation on your phone; Course + Green Maps adds green slope and 3D greens and uses one of your yearly green-map courses, unless that course is already unlocked. Satellite imagery can’t be stored. Rounds save on the phone and sync when you’re back online.

Your subscription includes slope maps and 3D greens for 12 courses a year. Certus asks before using one of your courses, and once downloaded the course is yours offline.

For GPS distances, hole previews, plays-like numbers, nearby courses and local weather. During a round it keeps updating with the screen locked so the Live Activity stays current. You can change the permission any time in Settings.

Start the round on your iPhone. After that the Watch uses its own GPS for the distance to the flag, so the phone can stay in the bag; scores you enter queue on the Watch and sync when the phone is back in range.

Open the round, tap the pencil at the top right and choose Edit on Map. Pick the hole with the arrows at the bottom, move the map until the crosshair sits where the shot was played from, and tap Place Shot Here. On the green the button logs a putt in feet, with − and + to fine-tune it. Tap Finish when you’re done. Don’t use + Shot from the play screen after the round, because it logs the shot wherever your phone is.

In Edit on Map, tap the numbered shot. The map centers on it and the shot rides the crosshair: move the map until the shot sits where the ball was, then tap Done. Cancel puts it back where it was, and Undo on the confirmation reverses a move.

In Edit on Map, tap the numbered shot, then Delete. The shots after it on the hole renumber. Undo on the confirmation brings it back.

Tap the numbered shot, then Details. To fix scores, putts or fairways instead, tap the pencil on the round and choose Edit Scorecard.

Mirror shows the camera live on the iPad and records nothing. Swing records one take at a time: tap record or press a volume button, and it stops on its own after your swing. Practice watches for up to 30 minutes and saves every swing it detects (2 seconds before impact to 1 after) as its own clip in the Practice folder. All three show the camera live on the iPad; a recorded swing plays there three times, then the iPad goes back to live.

In Swing mode the take ends 1.5 seconds after Certus sees a swing, so your clip is just the swing. A full rehearsal swing counts too, so make the first full swing the real one. A take with no swing stops at 15 seconds. To hit balls hands-free, use Practice.

Face On (square to your chest) shows sway of the head, chest, pelvis and knees, plus side bend and spine tilt. Down the Line (behind you, on the target line) shows posture: chest bend, pelvis thrust, knee flex. Stand 8–10 feet back with the phone at waist height in portrait, the sun behind the camera, and your whole body and the club in frame.

Prop the phone up, then press a volume button or an AirPods stem to start and stop, or set the countdown timer on the recorder. Practice mode needs no buttons at all. Tap the preview to focus and pinch to zoom when you’re framing from a distance.

Tap the frame-rate badge to switch, on the iPhone or the iPad, in Swing or Practice (in Practice, even mid-session). Speed records up to 240fps for slow motion. Accuracy (iPhones with LiDAR, where it’s the default) records 60fps with depth, so readouts can be in true inches. You’ll get 120 with Low Power Mode on, a hot phone, or in Swing while the iPad is showing it live. Turn off iPad Live Feed in the recorder settings to keep 240 and send clips only. The front camera always records Speed.

Swings are analyzed on your iPhone in the background. Queued means it’s in line. Paused means the camera is in use, or the phone is hot or under 20% and unplugged. Needs Wi-Fi means it has to download first. When Charging means Practice clips and older swings wait until the phone is plugged in. Star one to move it up, or open it to analyze now. Failed: press and hold the swing and choose Retry Analysis.

Certus only shows numbers it can measure reliably from that clip. When the camera angle can’t resolve one, the lines still draw but the number is held back. Sway is face-on only, and inch readings need a clip recorded in Accuracy mode. If a clip’s angle is set wrong, fix it in the swing’s Info.

On Swings, tap the import button, pick the video, and set the title, club, camera angle and folder. Slow-motion clips keep their frame rate. Imports are listed under the date they were filmed, so an older clip won’t appear at the top.

Open a swing, tap Compare and pick a second one. Choose Side by side or Overlay, step both to the same moment and tap Sync so they play together. In Overlay, Align lines the two golfers up.

Swing recordings go to New and Practice clips go to Practice. Those two folders can’t be deleted. Make your own folders, then use Move to Folder or Also Add to Folder on a swing. Star a swing to collect it in Favorites. In the Folders view, Select deletes several folders at once; their swings stay in your library.

Open a swing’s tools and tap AI Review. It sends up to ten key frames (address, top, impact and so on) with the club and camera angle, plus your usual miss and what you’re working on if you’ve said. AI Features must be on in Profile.

The swing is safe on your phone. Tap Retry on that row to try every failed upload again.

Sign in to the same Certus account on both devices, then open Coach Station on the iPad. Send to iPad is on by default in the recorder (the screen icon at the top). The iPhone’s view streams to the iPad live, and each finished clip arrives a few seconds after you swing, over a direct, encrypted connection between the two devices. From the Coach Station you can switch the iPhone between Mirror, Swing and Practice, start and stop Swing recordings, and flip between Speed and Accuracy.

No. Your iPhone is the only camera you need. Prop it up face-on or down-the-line and record.

Each swing you save is uploaded to private cloud storage so your library follows you across devices; a cached copy is kept on your phone for quick playback. Pose detection and analysis run on the iPhone itself. Clips sent to your iPad go directly between your devices. See the Privacy Policy for the details.

Tap the filter button at the top right of Stats and pick a Benchmark from Tour (+5) to 20. It starts at Scratch. Pick the level you want to reach: strokes gained shows your gap to that golfer, so the same round reads −1.0 against scratch and +1.0 against a 15. The same setting is in Profile and applies everywhere.

The HDCP on Home is the Handicap Index you entered in Profile. If you haven’t entered one, Certus estimates it from your rounds the WHS way: the best 8 of your last 20 differentials, from rounds with a course rating and slope, with complete 9-hole rounds counted by the 2024 method. It doesn’t apply every adjustment your official index does, so treat it as an estimate.

Check the filter button at the top right of Stats. It turns gold when a rounds window, round type, date range or course filter is narrowing things, and Home follows the same filter. Score averages and the Home bars use complete 18-hole rounds; a 9-hole round counts as half a round in per-round stats. Strokes gained needs shots logged on the map, not just scores.

Each bar is one recent full round: green is more than a stroke under your average, red more than a stroke over, and gold within a stroke. A trophy marks a tournament round. Tap ⓘ to see which rounds the average covers.

Both are right. Stats → Driving averages every drive, mishits included, because that’s how the benchmark is measured. Clubs shows your typical strike. It leaves out your shortest and longest few shots, so one duff doesn’t move it. That’s the number the caddie plans with.

The Coach opens after three rounds’ worth of shot data (two nine-hole rounds count as one). Until then there isn’t enough to tell a real leak from a bad day, and Certus won’t guess. Before that, the Home card is a Stats summary: a plain read of your numbers.

Open Stats → Coach and tap Ask about your game. It opens with the Coach and needs AI Features on. You get 20 questions a day and 300 a month; the app shows how many are left when you’re close, and everything else keeps working if you run out.

Scoring Leaks shows the strokes per round you lose to your benchmark in each part of the game, counted only when the loss is at least 80% certain. Tap the pill to compare with your own best rounds instead. Priority Fixes names the specific situations worth the most strokes, and the Watch List holds losses that need a few more rounds to confirm. Certus records your top fix, and five rounds later Check-In tells you whether it improved.

Go to More → Reports → Player Report, choose the rounds and Summary or Detailed, tap Generate Report, then Share with Coach to send the PDF. Export Data (CSV) in the same place exports your rounds, holes, shots and journal.

Both need shots placed on the map. Pin Position only counts holes with a saved pin. Set it with Set Pin during a GPS round or in Log Shots. Approach Dispersion uses approaches where the shot and the next one both have a map position.

Certus doesn’t give a verdict below sample size. Under Pressure waits for three tournament and three casual rounds with shot data; a club’s dispersion appears once it has 20 shots on the map; and a number turns green or red only when it’s at least 80% certain. Gray means it isn’t clear yet.

Yes. In Clubs, import a CSV from Trackman, GCQuad, Mevo, Rapsodo and most other launch monitors. Certus finds the club and carry columns and shows you the mapping before importing.

Tap Profile → Manage Subscription, or go to Settings → your name → Subscriptions. On a new device, tap Restore Purchases in Profile or on the subscription screen. Refunds are handled by Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.

Delete any swing, round or journal entry in the app and it’s removed from our servers. To delete everything, go to Profile → Delete Account. Cancel your subscription first with Manage Subscription, because Apple bills it separately. If you use Sign in with Apple, Apple asks you to confirm and Certus is removed from your Apple ID. Deletion is permanent, so export anything you want to keep first.

First check the setup above: same Certus account on both, Send to iPad on. Then open Certus once on each device with an internet connection so they can set up their secure link, and keep them near each other with Wi-Fi on. If the link drops mid-session the iPad says so and reconnects by itself. If it still won’t pair, update both to the latest version, restart the app on both and email us.

If the GPS fix is weak, a badge on the map shows its accuracy in yards. Check you picked the tees you’re playing. To fix the tee or pin, tap the tee dot or the flag, move the map and tap Set Tee or Set Pin. If a course still looks wrong, tap Refresh Course Data in map settings.