Straight Pool Deluxe 5.0 is a bigger update than usual. The headline change: played games and scored games are now unified. Instead of two separate setups, there’s a single “New Game” screen — pick two players, choose who breaks, and the app sorts out the rest. (Full detail below.)
Most of this page, though, is about one caveat for people who run the app on more than one device. If all your devices are on 5.0 or later, you can stop reading — there’s nothing here you need to worry about. But if you have one device on 5.0+ and another on 4.5.3 or earlier, you may notice a couple of small differences in how games are sorted once they sync between the two versions. The rest of this page explains them.
Earlier versions of the app treated played games (you and an opponent) and scored games (you scoring two other players) as completely separate categories from the very start — different setup screens, different player lists. You had to decide at the moment of creating a player whether they were “someone you play” or “someone you score for” — and once they were one, they couldn’t be the other.
5.0 unifies these. There’s now a single “New Game” screen where you pick two players and choose who breaks. If “Me” is one of them, it’s a played game. If neither is “Me,” it’s a scored game. For players you add from 5.0 onward, the same person can be in either kind of game without any setup distinction.
This is the first step, though — things aren’t quite 100% unified yet. Players carried over from older versions as scored-only keep a small transitional restriction: they’re labeled “Scored” in the player pickers and can’t yet be paired with “Me” in a played game. Everything else about them works normally. A future update removes that restriction (alongside the “Merge Players” feature below) and fully merges the two worlds.
Because earlier versions kept played and scored players in separate lists, some users ended up with two separate entries for the same real person — for example, one “Joe Smith” they played against and another “Joe Smith” they scored when watching matches. The two entries were necessary then; they couldn’t be combined.
In 5.0 the player list is unified, so both Joes now show up in the same list — usually right next to each other. Both still work exactly as they did before; their game histories are intact and unaffected.
A future update will add a “Merge Players” feature so you can combine two entries for the same person into one, with all their games and stats rolling up together. Until that ships, the two entries continue to coexist peacefully — no action needed.
Older versions of the app sort games into “Your Games” and “Scored Games” using a leftover bit of the old design — specifically, a flag stored on the player who breaks first. The new app doesn’t use that flag at all (it just looks at who’s playing the game).
For most of your data this is invisible — both versions agree on which list a game belongs in. For two narrow situations, though, an older device may show a game in the wrong list:
No games are lost in either case. Every game is still on every device, fully intact. The mismatch is purely about which list an older device pulls them into. Open the same game’s details directly and everything looks normal.
This is only an issue if you record games on the new version, and then sync to an iPad running an older version. The two issues mentioned above will only appear on the older iPad for games synced from a version 5.0+ iPad.
The reverse direction is completely safe. Games you record on an older iPad — whether played or scored — sync to a 5.0+ iPad with no classification issues at all. The new version sorts every game by who actually played it (rather than the old leftover flag), which is always correct, so games coming from an older device land in the right tab every time.
We considered fixing this on the older versions, but doing so cleanly would require shipping an update to those versions too, which Apple doesn’t make easy years after the fact. Instead, the new version handles the classification correctly going forward, and the disagreement only persists as long as you’re running both old and new versions side-by-side.
If you stick with 5.0+ everywhere, you’ll never see this. If you mix versions, you’ll see it for at most a small fraction of your games.
Thanks for sticking with the app — feedback@straightpooldeluxe.com if anything looks wrong.