Hogline is on the App Store now!
It is a curling scorekeeper and shot tracker for Apple Watch, it costs $4.99, and it is the app I have wanted since I started curling last year to track my game data and evaluate how I am playing over time.
Why it lives on your wrist
Curling rewards practice like any other sport. You get better at draws, at hits, at one turn before the other. The difference is that the people playing are also the people keeping score, in gloves, on ice, with a broom in one hand. So the scoring happens on a scrap of paper, and a scrap of paper can tell you who won but not how you threw.
A watch is already on your wrist, already under your sleeve, already there when you glance down. For me it was less one game than a pattern: I kept walking off knowing I had thrown badly without being able to say which shots did it, and that answer was never going to show up on paper.
Logging a stone takes three taps
Between shots there is no time for typing. So the whole interaction is three screens, one decision each:
Draw or hit. Two buttons, sized to hit with a mitt on.
In-turn or out-turn. Rotation on every throw, which is how you find out which turn is off.
How it landed. Perfect, good, okay, or miss. Tap it or spin the Digital Crown.
A haptic tap confirms the log, so you never look down twice.
Scoring an end takes two
When the end is decided, Hogline asks who scored and how many. That is it. Blank ends are a single button. The running score sits in yellow and red like the board at the club, with a game clock and an end clock going the whole time.
Then it hands you the game
The part I actually built this for. Finish a match and you get:
Shot success in points, scored the way curlers already score it
Split by shot type and by turn, so a 65 percent draw game next to a 100 percent hit game tells you exactly what to practice
Your best end, and an end-by-end timeline with result, accuracy, and duration
Spot your weak turn before your opponents do.
The rest of it
Built in SwiftUI for watchOS, so the haptics, the crown behavior, and the design language match the apps Apple ships
Fully offline. Club basements have terrible signal. Hogline does not care.
iCloud sync through your own private container. No Hogline servers, because I did not build any. Your season survives a lost, reset, or upgraded watch.
No account. Download, open, curl. You are logging stones ten seconds after install.
Easy on the battery. A full eight-end game barely dents the charge.
No ads, no analytics, no tracking. The privacy label is boring on purpose.
Why I am excited about it
The Apple Watch already has a curling workout. It works fine, and I use it. But it is generic by design. It tells you that you moved for two hours and burned some calories, which is true of curling and equally true of wandering around a hardware store. It knows the sport by name and very little else about it.
I like collecting data about my own life, and my curling has never been an exception. I already tracked my games. What I could not track, not without a clipboard and a level of discipline I do not have at nine on a Tuesday, was the shot level. Whether my out-turn draws were quietly falling apart while my hits carried the night. Whether I was actually improving or just remembering the good ones.
Now that is a couple of taps. And it works in tandem with the workout rather than replacing it, so league night still closes my rings and I still walk off knowing which turn to take to practice ice. That combination is the whole reason the app exists.
What is next
Version one is the smallest honest thing I could ship. What I'd like to work on next:
Undo. Correct a logged shot or a saved end score. Fat fingers in gloves are a fact of life and right now the app does not forgive them.
Accessibility audit. VoiceOver, and crown alternatives for anything that currently assumes a tap.
Hammer wired into the stats. Hammer efficiency, steals, force. The app already knows enough to calculate them, it just does not yet.
Complication and Smart Stack widget. A live match should be visible from the watch face without opening anything.
Health and fitness data. Integrating the app with the health and fitness ecosystem to track full workout and game stats.
Shareable stats. Something you can actually put in front of your team after a game.
An iOS companion app. This is the big one. Clubs, opponents, seasons, all the metadata a watch screen has no business asking you to type. That is where a season turns into something you can look back through.
If you curl and you try it, tell me what is missing. support@hogline.app comes straight to me.
Get it
Hogline on the App Store, $4.99 once, no subscription and no pro tier. Requires watchOS 10 or later, currently US and Canada. More at hogline.app.
I have been curling for a year. That is long enough to know I am bad at out-turn draws and nowhere near long enough to know why. Hogline is how I plan to find out.