What's new in Smart Padel 3.0: one account, every phone

Smart Padel exists because of a WhatsApp habit most padel groups know. Someone posts the game. People reply with their names. Someone else scrolls up to count. A spot opens, nobody notices, and the list in the chat stops matching the list at the courts.

The app's job is to make that list keep itself. Players tap I'm in, the spots fill, the waiting list holds, and someone moves up on their own when a player drops out. Then you get a fair Americano schedule, one-tap scoring and a board that ranks the night.

Version 3.0 doesn't add another feature to the night itself. It changes who the group belongs to. Your groups now live on your account, not on the phone in your pocket. That sounds small, but almost everything else in the release follows from it.

Your groups follow you, not your phone

The release notes open with one line: Smart Padel 3.0 keeps your groups on your account, so they follow you to any phone.

You sign in once, with your phone number, Apple or Google. After that your groups, your games and your career come with you. Your career is the Me tab: every night, every match and every placing across all the groups you play in.

That last part is why this had to come first. A stats tab with an all-time board, records, head-to-head tables and each player's chemistry (who they win most with, the opponent they lose to most) only works if the history behind it lasts. A record you lose when you change phones isn't much of a record.

There's a trade-off here, and I'd rather name it. Signing in is a step the app didn't ask of you before. I kept the choice of methods wide on purpose, so nobody has to make a new account just to join Wednesday's game. If you have a phone number, you can play.

Inviting someone by their number

The second change is the one I expect groups to notice most: you can now invite friends by their phone number.

There are two cases, and the app handles them differently.

If your friend is already on Smart Padel, the invite shows up in the app and they tap Join. No link to forward, nothing to paste.

If they're new, you send them the invite on WhatsApp, and it's waiting for them when they sign up. That's the case I cared about most. Most padel groups grow one friend at a time, and those friends are already in the group chat, not in the app. So the invite goes through the chat they're already in, and the app picks it up once they arrive.

The single invite link is still there too. Each group has one link you can drop into the group chat, and when someone joins through it, their player is built from their own profile. You don't create players by hand and then try to match them to real people later.

The whole group hears it

Once everyone is on an account, notifications can go to the right people. In 3.0 the whole group hears the moment something happens: a new game, a spot opening, the schedule going out, the result.

That builds on work from the last two point releases, and I'd rather point to it than pretend 3.0 came from nowhere. Version 2.0.3 was about calmer notifications: one notification per change, and never one about your own action. Entering scores stopped telling everyone their line-up had changed. Adding several players at once now sends a single notification rather than one per name.

The spot-opening notification matters more than the others. With a waiting list, the person who moves up needs to know they're playing, and the group needs to know the list changed. Before, that was the moment the WhatsApp version always fell apart.

What stayed the same

If you already use Smart Padel, the evening itself works the way it did.

You can still paste the group's usual WhatsApp announcement, and the app reads the format, courts, level and date to create the game. The night planner still works from the court booking (1, 1.5 or 2 hours), an optional 10-minute warm-up and the round length. The Americano generator still draws rounds across 1 to 3 courts for 4 to 12 players, with teams balanced by level. When there are more players than court spots, it keeps sit-outs as low as it can, and nobody sits twice while someone else hasn't sat at all.

Scoring is still a tap on the side that won. The whiteboard rule is still the default: 4 points for a win, 2 for a draw, 0 for a loss. You can still swap a player out of a single round when someone turns up late. The Board still ranks the night live, and a finished night still ends on the podium.

The things around your wrist and Lock Screen are unchanged too: the Apple Watch app for scoring, the On court complication, the Live Activity showing who's on court and who's up next, the widgets, and the Siri phrases like "I'm in" and "Who won?".

Version 2.0.4 sits just before this release, and it was a polish pass I'm glad shipped first. Generating a schedule, marking a game final, writing the recap, sending the schedule and adding a photo all now show they're working on the button you tapped. It's a small change, but nobody taps Generate twice wondering whether the first tap took.

What it means if you run a group

If you're the person who posts the game every week, 3.0 mostly removes chores you've been doing without thinking about them.

A player who changes phones doesn't drop out of the group. A new friend doesn't have to be talked through installing the app before you can invite them, because you invite their number and it waits for them. And when someone pulls out at the last minute, the group finds out from the app, not from you.

If you're a player who just turns up, the change is quieter. Sign in once, and your nights, your placings and your record against the friend who always beats you are yours from then on, on whatever phone you carry next.

That was the point of this release. The night already worked. Now the group lasts longer than any one phone.