50 Words or Less
The Scan My Golf Ball app offers an easy-to-use ball fitting process. Quickly identifies any golf ball to let you know if it’s a good fit for your game.
Introduction
The dozens of different golf balls currently available can be overwhelming. Equally overwhelming is the number of factors in finding the right ball for your game: the number of layers, compression, cover material, and more. That’s where Scan My Golf Ball comes in. This free app offers a quick and easy way to find your ideal golf ball.
What Does It Do?
While the name may confuse things a bit, the Scan My Golf Ball app is primarily a ball fitter. When you first open it up, you can tap on the Ball Fitting Tool and get a series of ball recommendations in just about a minute.
The namesake function of the app allows you to identify any golf ball that you find. There are over 500 golf balls in the database, each with information about the ball’s layers, compression, cover, and more. This is a big value for the player who likes to hunt for balls on the course. While it’s fun to find any ball, players who care about their score should be focused on gaming ones that fit their swing. Scan My Golf Ball can tell you whether the ball in your hand is a fit in just a few seconds.
Finally, there’s a strong educational component to this app. Once you have a ball selected, you can hit “Tap to learn more” for quality information about numerous different elements of a golf ball. The app explains the benefits of different cover materials, layer counts, and more.
It Is Effective?
Before answering that question, let me acknowledge that, just like club fitting, golf ball fitting is a combination of art and science. There are numerous approaches, and each one has value. With that said, I’ll go ahead and give Scan My Golf Ball a solid, “Yes” to the question above.
While some ball fitting processes focus on numbers and highly technical elements, Scan My Golf Ball is very easy to use. The entire process consists of just nine questions such as “My Biggest Challenge Is.” You also get to factor in cost and durability, which many ball fitters overlook. The three recommendations that this app generated for me made sense. If you feel like the app missed the mark, you can go back and tweak your answers to get new suggestions.
When I scanned a few of the golf balls that I play regularly, most came back in the “Good Fit” range. As a technical, data-driven player, I would love to know what made some of the balls a 100% fit versus a 75% fit, but that’s not disclosed at this point. Players also have the ability to add their own rating – one to five stars – of every ball that they scan. If you try lots of different balls, this can be a great way to remember what you liked and what you didn’t.
Finally, the latest update to Scan My Golf Ball adds the ability to assess a golf ball’s condition. I scanned a variety of golf balls, and the ratings made sense against what I could see with my own eyes. While this feature will seem silly to some players, it may be the push that others need to put a fresh ball into play. A badly scuffed ball can reduce distance up to 10% – a loss no golfer is eager to incur.
Value
The Scan My Golf Ball app is free, so there’s no reason not to try it. If you’re a gear nerd who is already familiar with most golf ball models, this may not be something you use regularly, but it’s worth getting another opinion on what golf ball is best for your game.
Conclusion
With Scan My Golf Ball, you are only a minute away from walking down the golf ball aisle with confidence instead of uncertainty. No more picking golf balls based on price or name brand, you can start playing the one that will perform best with your swing.
Download Scan My Golf Ball HERE
He founded Plugged In Golf in 2013 with the goal of helping all golfers play better and enjoy the game more.
Matt lives in the northwest suburbs of Chicago with his wife and two daughters.
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3 Comments
I found the app very disappointing. I’m a four handicap, senior golfer, looking for more distance and more height on my driver. Recommendations included the lowest flying and lowest spinning Titleist golf ball. The other two recommendations were soft golf balls. Golf ball testing has shown that firm golf balls go farther and spin more no matter your swing speed. A low spinning golf ball that goes farther but won’t hold the green doesn’t do anyone any good and in my opinion that goes for mid to high handicaps too
Bruce,
I don’t know why you’d be surprised that it recommended a low spinning ball when you asked for more distance. Low spinning balls are longer for most players. The issue of holding a green is an entirely separate point. All equipment decisions are trade offs.
-Matt
I just ran through the app and found the recommendations interesting.
In order of recommended – Snell Prime 2.0, Maxfli Tour, Titleist Velocity.
It was recommending the Callaway Warbird before tweaking a particular parameter. A bunch of 2-piece balls and a 3-piece. I really don’t care for 2-piece balls as they feel terrible/hard and tend to be ionomer/surlyn covers. The Vice Tour is the only surlyn cover I’ve played that I actually liked, but it’s also a 3-piece ball.
I play the Maxfli Tour now, and love it. Been playing it for a few seasons now.
The Scan Your Ball feature doesn’t work on my Android Galaxy phone for some reason which is disappointing, so I’ve had to manually enter balls I’ve played or am interested in playing. Again, interesting notes on the ball fit percentage. It likes the Maxfli Tour, but not the Vice Pro and it does like the OnCore Vero X1. Oddly enough, all three are the exact same compression and all three are fast swing and high spin (according to the app) along with being 3-piece. It does like the Vice Pro Air though at 75/medium/high stats.
I do wish it would give us more details on how the decisions were made and how the balls meet or don’t meet the 9 questions given. But it’s an interesting app that I’ll continue to mess with. Hopefully they fix the camera issue soon.