Help & FAQ

Getting Started

PickleBoard runs on Apple Watch and iPhone. The Watch app is the primary experience — a glanceable scoreboard right on your wrist. The iPhone app mirrors the same scoreboard for sideline scoring or Live Activity and Dynamic Island use during a game.

Your first game

1. Open PickleBoard on your Watch (or iPhone).
2. Tap a team’s side of the scoreboard to add a point.
3. Use the toolbar to undo a point, open Settings, reset the match, or call a timeout.
4. When the game ends, review the game-over card and tap Rematch to play again.

Free vs Pro

PickleBoard is free to download and play. Pro features — Live Activity, Dynamic Island, voice announcements, and match stats — are unlocked with a one-time in-app purchase. See the Pro Unlock section for details.

Scoring Modes

PickleBoard supports the three most-played pickleball scoring formats. Switch modes from Settings on either device.

Doubles

Standard pickleball doubles with automatic server rotation, side-out tracking, and a court position indicator. Default mode — works for the most common rec game.

Singles

Singles serving rules: one server per side, with sides switching based on the server’s score. The server number is suppressed because there’s only one server per team.

Rally

Score every rally, not just your serve. An optional freeze-at-target rule limits the leading team to scoring on their own serve once they reach game point. Default OFF (matches 2026 USAP rules); enable in Settings if your house rules call for it.

Game targets and win-by-2

PickleBoard supports targets of 11 (default), 15, and 21. Win-by-2 is enforced automatically — a game ends only when one team reaches the target with a 2-point lead.

Voice Announcements

After each point, your Apple Watch speaks the score aloud — server, receiver, server number, the way the pros call it. For example, “4, 2, 1” means the serving team has 4 points, the receiving team has 2, and the second server is up. Your eyes stay on the ball.

How to enable

1. Open PickleBoard on your Watch.
2. Tap the Settings button on the toolbar.
3. Toggle Voice Announcements on.

Tip: Voice announcements use the on-device speech synthesizer. No audio is recorded, and nothing is transmitted off your device.

iPhone vs Watch

Voice announcements play on the Apple Watch only. The iPhone scoreboard is silent by design — Live Activity and Dynamic Island carry the visual update on iPhone.

Live Activity & Dynamic Island

When the first point is scored, PickleBoard automatically pins the score to your iPhone Lock Screen as a Live Activity, and to the Dynamic Island on iPhone 14 Pro and later. No app to open. No interruption to play.

What you’ll see

• Lock Screen: Both team names (or “Team 1” / “Team 2”), the live score, and the serving team’s indicator.
• Dynamic Island compact: Score split between the two leading and trailing edges of the island.
• Dynamic Island expanded: Long-press the island for the full scoreboard.

How it ends

The Live Activity dismisses automatically about 30 seconds after the game-over moment, giving you time to glance at the final score before the system clears it.

iPhone Widgets

PickleBoard ships widgets for both your Home Screen and your Lock Screen. Every variant follows the same three-state design: live score while a game is in progress, the last final score after a game ends, and a friendly “Tap to score” prompt before your first match.

Home Screen sizes

• Small: Compact scoreboard with both team scores, mode, and the serving indicator. Falls back to the last final score (with a FINAL eyebrow) between games.
• Medium: Full team-name + score layout with the serving team highlighted. Same FINAL fallback between games, plus the relative timestamp (“5m ago”).

Lock Screen widgets

PickleBoard supports the three Lock Screen accessory families on iPhone:

• Circular: A glanceable score chip — “4-2” live, or the last final score between games.
• Rectangular: Wordmark, score, and the server number (doubles only). Shows a FINAL row with the last match score when no game is active.
• Inline: A single line of score text that lives in the Lock Screen status row above the clock.

How to add a Home Screen widget

1. Long-press an empty area of the Home Screen until icons jiggle.
2. Tap the + button at the top-left.
3. Search “PickleBoard” and pick the size you want.

How to add a Lock Screen widget

1. Long-press your Lock Screen and tap Customize → Lock Screen.
2. Tap a widget slot below the clock (rectangular / circular) or above the clock (inline).
3. Pick PickleBoard from the widget gallery.

Watch Complication & Always-On Display

Complication

Add the PickleBoard complication to a configurable Apple Watch face for one-tap launch. Supported families: Circular, Corner, Rectangular, and Inline.

1. Long-press the Watch face.
2. Tap Edit and swipe to Complications.
3. Tap a slot and pick PickleBoard.

Always-On Display

When you lower your wrist mid-game, the Always-On Display dims to a luminance-friendly version of the scoreboard — the score is still readable, and there’s no extra battery drain. The display restores full brightness when you raise your wrist.

Swipe-to-score gesture

Don’t want to tap? Swipe up on a team’s side of the scoreboard to add a point. Swipe gestures are an alternative to tap input — both work the same way.

Match Stats, Weather & Rematch

Match Stats is an opt-in feature that records where you played and the weather during your match, then surfaces both alongside your final score on the game-over screen and your shared image.

What gets captured

At the moment a game ends, PickleBoard takes two readings (only if Match Stats is enabled in Settings):

• Location — one CoreLocation fix, reverse-geocoded to a place name (e.g. “Cape May, NJ”).
• Weather — one Apple WeatherKit lookup at that location, returning the current temperature and conditions (e.g. “72°F & sunny”).

Where it appears

When stats are on, three surfaces get richer:

• Game-over card (iPhone & Watch) — two extra chips appear next to the always-shown Mode and Target chips: a location chip and a weather chip.
• Share card (1080×1080 image) — the same chips embed in the exported image, plus an Apple WeatherKit attribution footer at the bottom (Apple’s WeatherKit terms require this whenever weather is shown).
• Match history — your last 5 games persist their location and weather, so history views and the Home Screen widget’s FINAL state pick them up too.

When it’s off

The default is off. With Match Stats off, no Location prompt fires, no network request is made for weather, and the game-over card simply shows Mode and Target chips without place or weather. Nothing about the score, the engine, or your match history is degraded — you just lose the “where and what weather” layer.

Opt-in flow

Toggle Match Stats on in Settings. The first time you do, iOS prompts for Location access (When-In-Use). If you grant it, weather flows automatically — PickleBoard already has WeatherKit entitlement built in. If you deny Location, the toggle reverts and Settings shows a recovery row pointing to iPhone’s system Settings.

Rematch

Tap Rematch on the game-over card to start a new game with the same settings (mode, target, freeze-at-target, timeout count). The score resets to 0–0 and team names carry over on iPhone.

Share card

Tap Share on the game-over card to generate the 1080×1080 image — team names, final score, mode, target, location and weather chips (when stats are on), and the WeatherKit attribution footer — ready to share via Messages, Photos, Mail, or any social app.

Privacy: Location is captured once per game-end (never continuously), weather is fetched once per game-end, and both stay on your device only — nothing is sent to PickleBoard servers. Both are explained in the Privacy Policy.

Timeouts

Each team gets 2 timeouts per game by default. The count is configurable in Settings (0, 1, 2, or 3 — matches USAP rules).

Calling a timeout

1. On iPhone: tap the Timeout button on the toolbar, then pick the team.
2. On Watch: tap the Timeout button, then pick the team via the team-select sheet.

What happens

• The dot indicator below the team’s score decrements one notch per timeout (e.g. 2 → 1 → 0 with the default of 2 timeouts per game).
• If voice announcements are on, the Watch speaks “Time-out, team one” or “Time-out, team two”.
• Timeouts are not undoable (per pickleball rules — calling one is final). Score actions remain fully undoable via the Undo button.

Pro Unlock

PickleBoard is free to download. Pro features — Live Activity, Dynamic Island, voice announcements, and match stats — are unlocked with a single one-time in-app purchase. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal, and no recurring charge.

Restoring your purchase

If you’ve already purchased Pro and want to restore on a new device:

• iPhone: Settings → Restore Purchases.
• Watch: The Pro screen on Watch shows a hand-off button to wake the paywall on your paired iPhone. Purchase and restore both flow through iPhone.

Pickleball Rules — Official References

PickleBoard handles the scoreboard. The rules of the game itself come from USA Pickleball, the national governing body that publishes and maintains the Official Rulebook. The links below open the current rules straight from USAP’s site.

Quick references

• USA Pickleball — Rules Summary — concise plain-language overview, great for new players.
• USA Pickleball — Official Rules — full rulebook (PDF).
• usapickleball.org — rules updates, equipment standards, and tournament info.

What PickleBoard implements

PickleBoard supports the three most common casual-play scoring formats: Doubles (traditional side-out), Singles, and Rally (also called Rally Scoring). For first-server-only-on-first-service, server rotation rules, and the official 7-foot non-volley zone, defer to the USAP rulebook. For everything that happens on the scoreboard — points, sides, timeouts, freeze-at-target — PickleBoard is the source of truth.

Troubleshooting — FAQ