Stand in the fairway with a laser and you get exactly one number: the distance to the flag. It is a good number. It is also the least useful one for a full-swing approach, because the flag moves every day and the green does not. What you actually want is front, center, and back - the three numbers that tell you whether you can be aggressive or need to bail long. Here is how we get all three without a physical rangefinder.
What's Happening
We just shipped a two-view rangefinder into the app: a Hole tab that renders the whole hole from tee to green, and a Green tab that zooms to the putting surface. You drag a target circle anywhere on the hole and it splits into two live distances - carry to the target, then target to the green - each with a club suggestion pulled from your own learned yardages, not a generic chart. It reads like a caddie's yardage book, except it updates as you move.
The interesting part is under the hole graphic. To give you front, center, and back, most tools need three surveyed points per green. We looked at our mapping data and found the problem: hand-placed front and back markers exist on only about 7% of mapped holes, while an actual traced outline of the green exists on about 94% of them. So we stopped depending on the rare thing and started computing from the common one.
The Take
The move here is to treat the green as a shape, not as a pin. If you have the outline of the putting surface and you know the line you are approaching on, you do not need anyone to have marked the front and back for you - you can find them. Draw a ray from the player through the center of the green and see where it enters and exits the outline. The entry point is your front number, the exit is your back, and the difference between them is the green's depth on your exact line. All three fall out of the same piece of geometry.
That reframing is why the feature covers 94% of mapped holes instead of 7%. It is also why the numbers are honest on a per-shot basis: front and back are not static labels someone typed in once, they are computed along the line you are actually playing, so a green you are hitting on the diagonal reports a deeper target than the same green hit straight on - which is exactly the truth a good caddie would tell you.
The Proof
Two more things ride on top of that geometry. First, a plays-like number that is not just elevation: we swapped the old up/down-only adjustment for a distance that folds in wind, temperature, and altitude, so a 150 into a cold headwind stops pretending it is still 150. Second, a club callout that reaches into your own bag - it names the club whose stock yardage is nearest to the shot, using the yardages the app has learned from your rounds rather than a one-size chart.
And it is honest about what it does not know. If GPS has not settled, it says "Acquiring GPS" instead of showing you a confident lie. If a hole has no traced green outline, the Green tab is disabled rather than faking a surface, and the distance falls back to the pin as center. There is a small map-quality pill - basic, standard, or premium - so you always know how much real geometry is behind the number you are looking at. A distance you cannot trust is worse than no distance, so we would rather show you the honest state.
The Cut
A rangefinder should not just point at the flag. It should tell you the shape of the trouble - how deep the green is on your line, what the ball is really going to do in this wind, and which club in your bag actually covers it. That is the difference between a number and a plan.
That whole two-view yardage book, the ray-cast front-center-back, the weather-adjusted plays-like, and your learned club yardages all live in the caddie inside the app, on the holes we have mapped. It travels with you to the course in your pocket, no extra device to charge or forget in the cart.