For 3 years I was an Arccos user. Arccos is very similar to Garmin Golf with the CT10 sensors in theory: every shot is automatically recorded with the GPS location and club used so you can score your round accurately and get pro level detailed stats about your game. But Garmin Golf is worse than Arccos in literally every single way, I am incredibly disappointed with it. It feels like golf is an afterthought of an afterthought, zero development time has been put into the features.
During the round the features on the watch are reasonable, you can get true distance, "plays like" distance, scorecard, etc. However the app on the phone during the round is essentially worthless. You see a top down picture of the hole, but not an actual interactive map to see where you are and all that. I had to install 18birdies to use on my phone at the same time to get the same features as I get during the round as Arccos. There also isn't any sort of virtual caddie, Garmin knows how far I hit my clubs on average, it knows the distance to the hole, the slope, the wind, etc, there is no reason why it shouldn't be able to recommend a club.
All that is not great but I could overlook if the data gathered and stats presented after the round were as good or better than Arccos. However they are significantly worse.
Club Stats:
- All you get is average and max distances for all rounds, no ability to limit to # of last rounds or last shots
- No fairways hit, missed, left, right with driver
- No GIR hit, missed left, right, short, long with every iron and wedge
- No visual map of where shots went
- No Strokes Gained stats for clubs
Post-round Stats:
- All you get is an overhead map of each hole, a scorecard, and basic GIR and fairways hit stats
- No round average driving distance
- No strokes gained at all
- No scoring average by par of holes
- No way to compare yourself to other handicaps
Course Stats:
- All you get for course stats is # of rounds, average score, average GIR, average putts per hole, drive accuracy, and longest drive.
- No strokes gained at all
- No scoring average by par of holes
- No average score or stats per hole
- No handicap by shot type (drive, approach, short game, putting)
Player Stats:
- Garmin Golf has the "Performance Stats" section which has: # of rounds, average score over last 10 rounds, a very bad graph of Strokes Gained vs similar handicaps, very simple "increasing, decreasing, maintaining" trend images, and some sort of percentile ranking
- No Stroke Gained numbers and no ability to change who you are comparing yourself to
- No average scores by par
- No actual trend lines
- No stats of averages by hole length
- No stats of averages by hole shape
- No stats for approach distances
- No stats for shot terrain type (fairway, rough, sand)
Not to mention they have a great web app that all of this data can be viewed on, not just a phone app.
The single thing Garmin does better is work with my Garmin Fenix 7x watch that I already have. The watch itself is amazing and I wouldn't trade it for anything. But the Garmin Golf app fails in every category to the point that it is completely worthless. They are years behind in feature development and from what it seems they aren't working on trying to catch up to their competitors at all.
