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Start the round, then open the Live tab. The six-character code is at the top, with a share button next to it. They tap Join with a code on their own phone and type it in. That is the whole process — there is nothing to accept and nobody to add.
Yes, at any point. They get a card that starts on the hole they are standing on, and the holes before it stay empty. Those empty holes are not counted as zeroes — head-to-head, match play and skins only compare holes both sides have actually finished, so joining on the 14th does not put anyone 13 holes down.
Stroke play ranks on where you stand against par right now, and the thru count next to every score is the context for it. Someone 2 under thru 3 is genuinely playing better than someone 2 over thru 12, even though they have played less golf. Nobody is being credited for holes they have not played.
Scores usually land within about ten seconds. Fairway checks for updates on a timer and also gets a nudge from Apple's push service when someone posts — but push is unreliable on a golf course, so the timer is what does the real work. Pull down on the leaderboard to check immediately.
If nothing arrives at all, the most likely cause is that one of you has iCloud switched off. See below.
Fairway has no accounts and no server of its own. It uses the iCloud account already on your iPhone to tell players apart, which is what lets it work without ever asking you to sign up — and what stops anyone else editing your card.
Open Settings, tap your name at the top, then iCloud, and make sure you are signed in and iCloud Drive is on. Fairway will start syncing on its own; there is nothing to switch on inside the app.
Until then, everything except sharing still works: you can score a full round, use any format, and keep your statistics. Only the shared leaderboard is unavailable.
Because there is no account, your identity comes from the iCloud account on the phone. Signing into a different one makes you a new player. This is the trade-off for never having to create an account, and it cannot be undone from inside the app.
Course data comes from OpenGolfAPI, an open database of around 32,000 courses. Try the club's name without "Golf Club" or "Country Club". If it still is not there, email the club's full name and location and it can be raised with the data source.
Fairway only offers tees that publish a course rating and a slope, because without both there is no way to turn a handicap index into strokes. A course missing them cannot be scored with handicaps, so it is not offered rather than being scored wrongly.
Course handicap is your index multiplied by the slope over 113, plus the course rating minus par — the standard World Handicap System formula. The result is spread across the holes by stroke index: a handicap of 8 takes a stroke on the eight hardest holes, a handicap of 22 takes one everywhere and a second on the four hardest, and a plus handicap gives strokes back starting from the easiest hole.
Your course handicap is fixed when your card is created. Changing your index mid-round would move strokes between holes you have already played, so it does not affect a round in progress.
Part way through a round it only subtracts the strokes falling on holes you have actually played. Taking a full eighteen-hole allowance off an eight-hole card would credit you for ten holes you have not stood on.
Yes. Swipe back to the hole and change it, on any hole at any time. Clearing a score also clears the putts, fairway and green you recorded with it, so a deleted hole does not leave orphaned statistics behind.
That is expected, and nothing is lost. Scores are written to your phone first and shown immediately; sending them happens afterwards. When you walk back into coverage they go out on their own — you do not need to reopen the app or re-enter anything.
Only you, on the phone that created it. This is enforced by CloudKit rather than by the app, so it holds even for somebody who has your round code.
Email furniturewala@yahoo.com. Including your iOS version, the course, and what you expected to happen makes it much quicker to sort out.