Your Rangefinder Should Know What Hole You're On. Now It Does.
Three small native fixes this week: the rangefinder follows your live hole, the map orients tee to green, and every distance on screen now trusts the same GPS.
You open the rangefinder on the 3rd, get your number, put the phone away, play three more holes, and pull it back out on the 6th. The screen is still showing you the 3rd. A rangefinder that does not know what hole you are standing on is not a rangefinder. It is a compass pointed at the wrong thing. We shipped three native fixes this week that, together, make the on-course map agree with where you actually are.
What's Happening
The first fix is the obvious one: when you advance holes during a round, the open rangefinder now follows you to the live hole instead of sitting on whatever hole you opened it to. That sounds trivial and was not, because the sync has to tell two different situations apart. Moving to the next hole should move the map. But if the round's identity changes underneath it, a different course loaded, the hole count corrected, that is not the same event and cannot be handled the same way. We split it into two rules: when the round's course or starting hole changes, the map resets to that round's real starting hole; when only the hole count changes, the map leaves your current hole alone and only nudges it if it is now out of range. One effect for "this is a different round," one for "same round, the bounds moved."
The second fix is orientation. Hole maps now draw tee at the bottom and green at the top, every time, by resolving the tee end from the hole's own line even when the underlying data had the two ends stored backwards. Before, a hole whose coordinates ran green-to-tee could render upside down, so the layup you were reading was on the far side of the picture from where your brain expected it.
The third is the quiet one, and the one that matters most for trust. The headline yardage already refused to use a GPS fix that was stale or plainly off the course. This week we made the map dot, the layup segments, and the shot-measurement tool use that exact same gate. They were each doing their own thing, which meant one cached location could leave your big number correct while the dot on the map sat in a pond. Now every distance on the screen is drawn from one approved position or none of them.
The Take
A rangefinder earns trust by agreeing with itself. The number, the dot, the layup line, and the direction of the hole all have to tell you the same story, or you stop believing any of them and go back to pacing off the sprinkler head.
A confident yardage and a map dot in the wrong fairway cannot both be right, and the moment you spot the second one you stop trusting the first.
None of these three is a headline feature. They are the kind of fix that is invisible when it works and infuriating when it does not: the map keeping up with your feet, the hole pointing the right way, and one honest source of truth behind every distance. We did not paper over any of them. We did not add a "recenter" button to let you fix the stale map by hand, or a toggle to flip a hole that rendered backwards. We changed what the code counts as your position, your hole, and your tee, so the right thing happens without you thinking about it.
The Proof
The GPS alignment is the clearest example of a real fix versus a patch. The bug was three parts of the same screen each deciding on their own whether to trust a location.
The old screen let four distance tools each decide whether to trust a location. The new one routes them through one gate, so the number and the picture always come from the same place.
Splitting the live-hole sync into two rules was the same kind of discipline. It would have been easy to write one effect that fires on any change and resets the map, and it would have quietly stomped on you every time the hole count updated mid-round. Telling "different round" apart from "same round, bounds moved" is the difference between a map that follows you and a map that keeps yanking you back to the first tee.
The Cut
The rangefinder is the part of the app you use without looking, standing over a shot, deciding between clubs. That only works if it is honest: on the right hole, pointed the right way, drawing every number from a location it actually trusts. This week it got quieter and more correct in three places at once, which is the kind of week we like.
If you want a rangefinder that keeps up with your round instead of the hole you left behind, that is the part we sweat.