BluePadel for Wear OS — User Manual

Applies to BluePadel 1.2.0 and later for Wear OS, paired with BluePadel Companion for Android. Last updated 16 May 2026.

BluePadel turns your Wear OS watch into a padel scoreboard. Tap to award points, set after set, and the result auto-syncs to the BluePadel Companion app on your phone where you can review every match in detail. This manual walks through every screen, every setting, and every feature.

01Requirements

BluePadel installs in two parts that work together:

• Watch app — runs on Wear OS 3 or later (Pixel Watch, Galaxy Watch 4 / 5 / 6 / 7, TicWatch Pro 5 and later, Mobvoi, Fossil Wear OS devices). Minimum SDK 30.
• Phone companion — runs on Android 8.0 Oreo or later (API 26+). Both apps install from the same Google Play listing under the package co.za.bluepadel.

Your watch and phone must be paired through the standard Wear OS setup before BluePadel can sync. The pairing is the Wearable Data Layer pairing already in place when you set up the watch.

02Install

1. On your Android phone, open Google Play and search for BluePadel.
2. Tap Install. Play will install BluePadel Companion on the phone, then push the Wear OS build to your paired watch automatically.
3. Wait 30–60 seconds for the watch install to complete. You'll see a "BluePadel installed on your watch" toast.
4. If the watch install doesn't trigger, open the Play Store directly on the watch (long-press the side button → Play Store on most Wear OS watches), search for BluePadel, and tap Install there.

03Pair the watch and phone

BluePadel uses the Wearable Data Layer that's built into Wear OS for sync — there's no separate Bluetooth pairing step to do inside the app. After installation:

1. Open the watch app once. It prepares the local match database and registers the foreground-service listener.
2. Open the phone Companion app. The Watch tab will confirm the pair is connected and the watch app is installed.
3. If the Watch tab says "Watch not detected", swipe down to refresh. If it persists, open Google Play Services on both devices and force them to sync (usually a setting-to-restart cycle).

04Start a new match

Open BluePadel on the watch. The launch screen is New match → Format:

Padel

Standard tennis-style padel scoring. You'll be asked for two more things on the next screens: best-of and deuce mode (see Choose the rules).

Mexicano

A tournament round-robin format gaining ground globally. There are no games or sets — you race to a total points target (default 21), serves switch every 5 points, and the winner of the warmup rally automatically gets the first point. There are no deuce rules and no tiebreaks. Mexicano is great for ladder nights and short tournament rounds.

Tap your chosen format and scroll down to confirm with Continue.

05Choose the rules

For Padel matches, you'll set three things:

Best of

Deuce mode

How a 40–40 game resolves. BluePadel ships with four options:

Final-set super-tiebreak

Toggle this on (default on for Best of 3 and 5) and the deciding set is replaced by a single first-to-10, win-by-2 tiebreak. Toggle it off to play a full final set with normal game/tiebreak rules.

06Pick the first server

After the rules picker, you'll land on the Warmup screen — a quick "who serves first?" decision.

• We serve — Us takes the first game's serve. Serves then alternate every completed game.
• They serve — Them serves first. Serves alternate from there.

In Mexicano, the "warmup result" counts as the first point — so the side you pick effectively starts 1–0 and serves the first 5-point block.

07The seven layouts

BluePadel ships with seven match-screen layouts ("skins"). They all drive the same scoring engine — only the visual arrangement changes. Pick one in the phone app under Settings → Match layout and it syncs to the watch immediately.

08Score the match

The watch is now in live-match mode. Score on every rally won.

Tap zones

Tap the side that won the rally. In Half-and-half, that's the left half (blue, Us) or right half (white, Them). In Vertical stack and Concentric the geometry is different but the principle is the same — tap your side.

Hardware buttons

Useful when your fingers are wet or the screen is grimy:

Hardware buttons work in every skin and replicate the on-screen Undo / End pills exactly.

Undo

The amber Undo pill walks the scoring engine backwards through every state — game point, deuce, advantage, even completed sets — exactly the way you arrived. There's no limit; you can undo all the way back to 0–0 if you've made a string of errors.

End match

The red End pill (or the BACK hardware button) requires two taps within 3 seconds to actually end the match. The first tap arms the action and turns the pill brighter red — the second confirms. After 3 seconds with no second tap the action disarms. Use this to safely end a match early (injury, weather, ran out of time) without the risk of an accidental brush of the pill killing your match.

Tapping Undo while End is armed cancels the End instead of undoing a point — the Undo label changes to "Cancel" during this window.

Serve indicator

A small yellow-green tennis ball floats next to the serving side's label. The ball alternates sides every completed game (for Padel) or every 5-point serve block (for Mexicano).

Inactivity timeout

If 25 minutes pass with no points scored and no button presses, the match auto-stops to preserve battery. You'll see a summary screen with the score so far. The timeout duration is configurable on the phone (Settings → Match timeout).

09Health and shots

BluePadel runs as a proper Health Services exercise session for the duration of the match. That gives you:

• Heart rate — minimum, maximum, and average over the match.
• Calories — kcal estimate based on the live heart-rate and your Google Fit profile.
• Steps — yes, padel involves a surprising amount of running.
• Distance — derived from steps and your stride length.
• Active time — total elapsed time minus stationary periods.

A separate on-watch motion analyser tracks the accelerometer to detect padel shots. Each shot is classified as one of:

• Forehand — set your dominant hand in Settings → Handedness so the classifier knows which wing is which.
• Backhand
• Smash — high-velocity overhead motions.

The same motion data is used to segment the match into rallies, so your stats show how many shots a typical rally lasts and how often you smash. All of this is written onto the match record at end-of-match and synced to the phone.

10After the match

When the last set is decided (or you tap End), the watch shows the Summary screen with:

• The final result: We win or They win in big text.
• Per-set scores stacked underneath (e.g., 1–6 / 6–4 / 7–6).
• A "Sent to phone" confirmation when the sync completes — usually within a second.
• A Done button to return to the main menu.

The Summary screen is colour-coded: blue background on a win, white on a loss.

11The phone companion

Open BluePadel on the phone. Three main tabs:

History

Scrollable list of every match. Filters at the top toggle Day / Month / Year windows. Pull-to-refresh to fetch newly synced matches. Long-press a row to enter multi-select mode and bulk-delete.

Match detail

Tap a row to open the detail view. You'll see:

• Final score and duration.
• The deuce mode used, the layout used, the first server.
• Health card: HR min/max/avg, calories, steps, distance, active minutes.
• Shots card: total shots, FH count, BH count, smash count, average shots per rally.

Stats

A summary card showing matches played, wins, losses, win rate, average minutes per match, and sets won / lost — all scoped to the current filter window. Change the filter (Day / Month / Year) to look at different time ranges.

12Settings on the phone

The phone holds all the per-installation configuration. Changes here sync to the watch on the next reconnect.

13Languages

BluePadel supports six languages out of the box:

• English
• Spanish (Español)
• Portuguese (Português)
• French (Français)
• Italian (Italiano)
• Afrikaans

On first launch BluePadel uses your phone's system language. To change it, go to Settings → Language on the phone — every screen on the phone updates immediately, and the watch picks up the new language on next reconnect. The choice covers every screen: Rules, Warmup, Match, Summary, History, Stats, and Settings.

14Troubleshooting

The watch isn't detected by the phone app

Confirm the watch is paired in the Google Wear OS app on your phone, and that both devices are on the same Google account. Restart Google Play Services on both devices (Settings → Apps → Google Play Services → Storage → Clear cache). Pull-to-refresh in the Watch tab of BluePadel Companion.

A match didn't sync to the phone

Match data queues in the Wearable Data Layer when offline. Bring the watch within Bluetooth range of the phone and open BluePadel Companion — the listener service will pick the match up. Force-stopping and reopening the phone app flushes the queue.

Heart rate shows 0 or no shot detection

Check permissions on the watch: Settings → Apps → BluePadel → Permissions. BODY_SENSORS drives HR, ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION drives steps and shot detection. Both are optional but the matching feature won't work if denied.

The watch face freezes mid-match

Unlikely but if it happens: long-press the side button to force-stop the app. The current match state was persisted on every score, so reopening the app and continuing from the same match is supported. If you can't recover the in-progress match, the partial result still syncs to the phone.

The Undo pill stopped working

Undo walks back to the start of the match. If you've already undone every point you'll see the pill greyed out — that means you've fully reset. End the match and start a fresh one, or just score back up from where you are.

The summary screen says "Stopped"

That means the 25-minute inactivity timeout triggered. The score at the time of stopping is saved, but the match isn't marked as won or lost — just stopped. You can resume from the Watch app's main menu by selecting Continue last match.

Where's my data?

On your phone, in BluePadel Companion's private app storage. Nothing leaves your devices unless you choose to share it. See the Privacy Policy for full detail.

Need more help?

Email hello@bluepadel.co.za with your watch model, BluePadel version (Settings → About on the phone), and what's not working. Screenshots help.