Do judges need to download an app?

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Short answer: no. Judges open a link on whatever phone or tablet they already have, type the competition code and a four-digit PIN, and they're scoring. There's nothing to download and no account to create.

But the question is usually standing in for a different one — is this going to be a hassle on the day? — so it's worth answering that properly.

What actually happens on competition morning

Picture the alternative for a moment. A native app means every judge needs it installed before they arrive. Which means an app store account, which for a volunteer judge means an Apple ID they may not remember the password to, on a personal phone they'd rather you didn't put software on.

Then multiply it. Club iPads of four different vintages. A judge who's come from another club. A late substitution at 8:15 because someone's child is ill. And the thing that ruins mornings more than any of it: an app that decides today is the day it wants updating.

Every one of those is a job for the one person who already has the most to do. With a link, none of them exist. The panel that turned up unexpectedly gets the same link as everyone else.

So is ChalkItUp an app or not?

It's a web app — which, to be clear, is a real app. It does everything you'd want the scoring app to do: judges score, leaderboards update live, coaches check their own gymnasts behind a PIN, the announcer reads from a clean screen, the sound desk plays floor music. The only thing it skips is the installing.

If you want it to feel like an app, every modern phone and tablet will add a link to the home screen. It then opens full-screen with its own icon and no browser bar — which is the part of a native app most people actually wanted.

The part that surprises people: old iPads work

Because there's no app store involved, we're not bound by what the current version of iOS supports. There's a separate lightweight judge screen that runs on hardware going back to iOS 12 and the first-generation iPad Air.

That 2014 iPad in the club cupboard, the one no app store app will touch any more, will score a competition perfectly well. For a club deciding whether digital scoring means also buying six tablets, that's usually the deciding detail.

Built for a sports hall, not an office

Judges put tablets down. Screens lock between rotations. A panel breaks for twenty minutes and comes back. On a lot of systems that means logging in again, or worse, discovering the half-entered score has gone.

ChalkItUp holds a judge's session through all of it. Tablet sleeps, screen locks, iPad sits face-down on the table through a break — they pick it up and carry on exactly where they were. That's not an accident of the design; it's the thing we spent the most time getting right, because it's what actually happens at a competition.

Why this was a deliberate choice

It would have been easier, in some ways, to ship a native app — it sounds more substantial, and "download our app" is a simpler sentence than the one at the top of this post.

But the people who use ChalkItUp on competition day mostly aren't your staff. They're volunteer judges, visiting coaches, and four hundred parents who will use it once, for ninety seconds, to find out how their daughter did on vault. Asking any of them to install something is asking for a thing you won't get. Asking them to open a link is asking for nothing at all.

There's more detail on devices, roles and what each person opens on the gymnastics scoring app page.