A padel score tracker you can actually reach mid-match
Most padel score trackers are a counter with two buttons. That holds up until the golden point, the timed booking, or the set nobody can agree on. This is what Pelota does instead — and where it deliberately stops.
What people mean when they search for one
The search usually comes from one of two frustrations. Either the score keeps getting lost — one pair says 4-3, the other says 3-4, and the game restarts from a negotiation — or the app being used was written for tennis and has never heard of a golden point. Both are fixable, and both need the tracker to be somewhere your hands can reach in the ten seconds between points.
The app puts it on your Apple Watch. Tap the side that won the point, feel the haptic, and the score is settled before the next serve. Your iPhone stays in the bag; if you do take it out and stand it up, it shows the same score at full-screen size, which is what the people at the back of the court end up reading.
It is worth being clear about what a tracker is not. It does not watch the ball or listen to the court: it counts what you tell it, applies the rules of the format you chose, and remembers the result. Everything it does afterwards is built on that one honest input.
Tracking the format your club actually plays
Padel is not scored the same way twice. Club night runs golden point because the courts are booked to the minute. A more serious fixture plays the advantages out. Saturday morning ends when the hour ends, whatever the score is. A tracker that knows one of those is a tracker you stop opening in week three.
The app is set up once, before the first point: best of three or best of five, golden point or advantages, the star point that settles a game after two lost advantages, timed play, the tiebreak variation in use, or a custom combination for the clubs that have invented their own. From there the watch enforces it, including the awkward endings that break simple counters — a set decided on a tiebreak, a match decided by the clock.
Tennis is scored properly too, with its own rules and its own vocabulary, so a Tuesday padel game and a Saturday singles match live in one app instead of two.
The score is the record, not just the display
A counter forgets the match the moment you close it. Pelota keeps every point with the shape of the game around it, so the final scoreline is the top of a page rather than the whole of it.
That page is on your iPhone when you finish: the match walked through game by game, your serve patterns and what each of them produced, winners set against forced and unforced errors, and one Performance Score for the match as a whole. Enough of it accumulates that after a couple of months you are reading a season rather than a scoreline. The deeper analysis is part of Pelota Pro; keeping score is free and stays free.
When it is over, the score can leave the court
A result that only exists on your wrist is still a result somebody has to retell in the group chat. The app builds a card out of the finished match instead: the score on a court background, on one of your own photos, or on a plain colour, with the stats you want visible laid over the top, in the shapes stories and posts want.
If a picture is not enough, the whole match goes across as a .pelota file over AirDrop, and your partner opens it from their own side of the net — their results as theirs, rather than a screenshot of yours. Both of those are part of Pelota Pro. The scoring itself never asks for anything.
Nothing to sign up for before you score, nothing to connect to
You don't need an account to score. Pelota does not ask for an email address in exchange for counting to six, and it does not need a connection to do it — which matters, because a good share of the world's padel courts are underground and the rest are behind a metal fence.
You need an iPhone on iOS 18.0 or later and an Apple Watch on watchOS 10 or later, and both apps come in the same download. The interface is available in eight languages, so the score reads the way you say it out loud.