badmintho keeps no match database of its own. Every match you play is saved as a badminton workout in your Apple Health, and badmintho reads it back from there when you open History. This is what that workout holds, and why we built it that way rather than keeping a copy of our own.
What one match holds
- The workout. A badminton workout from the first serve to the end of the match, with each game inside it. When your Apple Watch records the match, the workout also carries the heart rate, energy and distance it measured.
- Every point. Each point is saved as a marker at the moment it was scored, with the side that scored it and their new score.
- The players. The names on each side, and which side was yours when you have picked your colour.
- Umpire marks. If someone marked the rallies from a second phone, each winner, unforced error or service fault is saved beside the score of the rally it describes.
- The court. If you switch on court tagging, the name and location of the court you played at.
badmintho writes two kinds of data to Health: workouts, and water if you log a drink from the watch during a match. Everything else it asks for, it only reads.
Why every point carries its moment
Saving the final score would have been enough to show who won. We saved every point with its time instead, because the score of a match is a sequence, and the sequence is where the useful questions are: when did the game turn, and how long were the rallies?
That decision paid off in badmintho 26.4. Its match details show each side’s longest scoring run, such as six points in a row from 8–11, and the typical rally length. Both are worked out from the markers a match already carries, so they appear for matches you played before 26.4 existed, not just for the ones after it. The match details come with badmintho Pro; the markers are saved with every match either way.
Without a watch, nothing is made up
If you keep score on the iPhone alone, the phone saves the match as a workout too: its time, the players and every point. What it does not save is heart rate, energy or distance, because the phone did not measure them. We could have estimated them. We chose an honest record of what happened over a figure that looks complete and is invented.
With a watch, one match is one workout
When the Apple Watch is recording the match, the phone steps aside. Two workouts covering the same time would count the match twice in your Activity rings, and Health does not merge them. So the phone saves only the part the watch did not cover, or nothing at all when the watch had the whole match, and the two parts add up correctly.
Where the court is, not where you were
Court tagging is off until you switch it on. When it is on, badmintho checks your position as you set up a match, only to suggest the nearest court you have saved. What goes into Health is that court’s name and its coordinates: the venue’s location, never your own. You can change or clear the suggestion before the match starts.
Your matches stay yours
Because the record lives in Health, it sits with the rest of your health data, under the permissions you set there. It does not depend on badmintho to exist:
- Delete a match in Health and it is gone from badmintho’s History too, without restarting the app.
- Stop using badmintho and the workouts stay in Health, with their time, heart rate and energy.
- Withdraw access at any time in Settings › Health › Data Access & Devices.
On the device, badmintho keeps your settings, your saved players and courts, and a cache of match details so History opens quickly. red8.io runs no server that receives your matches, and there is no account to create.
What badmintho asks Health for
The permission sheet lists only what the app actually uses on that device. On the iPhone it asks to read workouts, heart rate, resting heart rate, heart-rate variability and one-minute heart-rate recovery, active and resting energy, walking and running distance, steps and physical effort. The watch asks for the figures it records during a match, plus your water total for today and your date of birth, which sets the heart-rate zones. The badmintho privacy policy describes the rest, including the two things that can leave the app, and only if you switch them on.
More
- badmintho: the product page, with the App Store link
- What leaves your device, and what never does: every request each of our apps makes
- badmintho FAQ: scoring, playing with others, and what is free and what is Pro
- Badminton scoring rules: rally-point scoring, explained