The gymnastics scoring app with nothing to install

Is there a ChalkItUp app? Yes — it just doesn't need downloading

This is the question we're asked most, and the honest answer is: ChalkItUp is a web app. Everything a native app does on competition day, it does — judges score, leaderboards update live, coaches check their own gymnasts, the announcer reads the ceremony order off a clean screen. What it skips is the installing.

That matters more than it sounds. A club running a competition has judges arriving with their own phones, a bag of club iPads of varying ages, a volunteer on the sound desk who turned up on the day, and parents with every device ever made. Getting a native app onto all of that — accounts, downloads, an update prompt at 8:40am — is a job nobody wants. A link and a PIN is not a job at all.

What each person opens

Nobody needs an account except you. Everyone else gets a link, and a code if their role needs one.

Which devices it runs on

Anything with a browser. iPads, Android tablets, iPhones, Android phones, laptops — the judge screen is built for touch and works the same on all of them. There's no minimum spec to check before you buy tablets, because you don't need to buy tablets.

It goes further back than most apps do: a separate lightweight judge screen supports older hardware right down to iOS 12 and the first-generation iPad Air. The club iPads that have been in the cupboard since 2014 will score a competition. An app store app would have dropped support for those years ago.

Where all the E judges share one tablet, shared device mode lets the whole panel score on a single iPad behind one device PIN — no individual logins, and no second device to buy.

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. ChalkItUp holds a judge’s session through all of it — tablet asleep, screen locked, iPad face-down on the table — and they pick it up exactly where they left off, with nothing re-entered and nobody logged out.

That is the part we spent the most time getting right, because it is what actually happens on competition day.

Why not build a native app?

We considered it, and the maths doesn't work in a club's favour.

A native app means an app store listing, an install on every device before the competition, and an update that will inevitably want installing on the morning of your event. It means a volunteer judge downloading something onto their personal phone, and a club secretary trying to explain Apple IDs to a panel of judges. It means a parent standing in a sports hall deciding whether to spend 40MB of their data allowance to see their daughter's vault score.

A link costs none of that. It opens in whatever browser is already on the device, the version is always current because it's served fresh, and a parent can be looking at the leaderboard four seconds after you post the link in the club group chat.

If you want it to feel like an app, every modern browser will add a link to the home screen — it then opens full-screen with its own icon, which is the part of a native app people actually wanted.

Who it's for

UK gymnastics clubs running anything from an in-house grading to a multi-session open competition. If your judges are currently on paper and your results are in a spreadsheet, the step you're taking is not "buy an app" — it's "send some links". A free trial runs a full competition end to end, up to ten gymnasts, before you commit to anything.

The fuller feature breakdown — scoring formats, panels, exports, leaderboard control — is on the gymnastics scoring software page.