HPT Is Live: The Hockey Tracker App Hits Both Stores

Why We Built a Hockey Tracker App

HPT started with a simple complaint. The only hockey tracker app worth using was iOS-only, and it stopped short of what a player actually wants after a game. You could see a chart. You could not do much with it. If you wanted to show a teammate your shifts, you took a screenshot and texted it. If you played on Android, you had nothing at all.

The screenshot habit got old fast. What he wanted was a tracker that handled every shift without being told, worked on both phone platforms and both watch platforms, and let the people he played with see and react to a session without passing a phone around the locker room. Nobody was building that, so we did.

The tagline we settled on early still holds: Track every shift. Dominate your game. Everything in the app is in service of those two sentences.

What HPT Does on Launch Day

HPT records a hockey session from the watch on your wrist. No extra sensor, no puck tag, no clip for your shin pad. Press start on the bench, or let the watch recognise that the game has begun, and it does the rest.

• Automatic shift detection. The watch tells the difference between a shift and a bench rest, so you get shift count, average shift length, longest and shortest shift, and your work-to-rest ratio. Read how it works on the shift tracking page.
• Speed and distance. Top speed, average speed and distance skated per session, with the sensor fusion tuned separately for Apple Watch and Wear OS hardware.
• Heart rate and recovery. Heart rate zones during the game, heart rate recovery afterwards, and a readiness picture that tells you whether your body is ready for tomorrow's skate.
• Fatigue and explosiveness. Acceleration bursts, a fatigue index across periods, and pace consistency, so you can see where in the game your legs went.
• Community. Post a session to your feed, follow friends, react to their games, and compare your numbers against the player tiers on our hockey benchmarks.

For a fuller tour of the metrics, see Core Features of HPT. The short version: a scoresheet keeps the goals and assists, and HPT keeps everything else.

The Build, by the Numbers

The first commit landed on 2 June 2025. The approved 1.0 builds went into the stores sixteen months later. Here is what sits between those two dates, counted straight from the repositories.

Six repositories sounds like a lot for one app, and it is. HPT is really five products that have to agree with each other: an iPhone app, an Android app, an Apple Watch app written in Swift, a Wear OS app written in Kotlin, and the backend that turns raw watch data into something readable. Each one has its own codebase, its own tests, and its own way of being wrong.

The Hardest Part: Parity Between Apple Watch and Wear OS

If you ask the team what took the longest, nobody says "the charts". The answer is parity. A player on an Apple Watch and a player on a Galaxy Watch should finish the same game with numbers they can compare, and the two watches do not make that easy.

They sample motion at different rates. They report heart rate on different schedules. One platform hands you a workout session API that the other does not have. Distance on one watch would come in high, get fixed, and then the same fix applied to the other platform would push its numbers low. For months the two watches took turns being wrong. Every shift-detection change had to be proven on both wrists, on real ice, before it shipped.

Some of the beta stories we tell each other now:

• The one megabyte that crashed the watch. Apple Watch limits how much an app can keep in its lightweight settings store. HPT queued session data there while waiting for the phone. A tester with a backlog of unsynced sessions hit the limit, and the watch app refused to open until the queue moved to proper files on disk.
• Two watches, one rink. To test parity properly we strapped an Apple Watch and a Galaxy Watch on the same player for the same games. The Galaxy consistently read heart rate low on the same wrist. We spent weeks on wrist placement theories before the data showed it was not placement at all.
• Fourteen languages on four platforms. Every watch string has to exist in the phone app, the backend, the Swift watch defaults and the Kotlin watch defaults, with identical placeholders, or one platform silently falls back to English. We ended up writing a guard that refuses a translation whose format signature does not match the English original.

None of this shows up on a feature list. All of it is the difference between a tracker you trust and one you stop wearing.

What the Beta Players Logged

We ran an invite-only beta on both platforms through the 2025-26 season, and we published a mid-season look at the iOS beta along the way. With both watches now in the stores, here is the combined picture from the beta database, excluding sample and deleted sessions.

Our favourite number is the fights. Nine times, a player opened the app after a game and decided that detail belonged in the record. We agree.

The 9,302 km also deserves a second look. That is roughly the drive from Halifax to Vancouver and halfway back, skated one shift at a time by people who mostly pay to play.

What Comes Next, and Who Decides

Version 1.0 is not the end of the roadmap. It is the point where the roadmap stops being ours alone. The app has a feature request board built in, and the beta players have already used it. Twenty-two requests are on the board today. Six are shipped, including larger watch controls, automatic game-start detection, injury tracking and a log for skate sharpening hollows. Others under review came straight from the ice: voice commands for logging stats mid-game, WHOOP and TrainingPeaks integrations, gear history, and a variable maximum shift length for players whose leagues run long changes.

That is how new features will be sourced from here. Players post what they want, other players vote and comment, and the team builds in that order. A web Player Portal is already in progress because the board asked for it, and a Coach Portal is planned next. If you want something that is not on the list, you know where to put it.

Built by Hockey Players, for Hockey Players

HPT is a small, founder-led team. The people who tune the shift detector play in the leagues it tracks, and the first bug report after a game usually comes from the locker room. That is not a marketing line. It is why the app records what a player actually wants to see and leaves out what a player does not care about.

Both apps are free to download. The Starter plan is free forever with no ads, every new account starts with a free 30-day Pro trial, and Pro unlocks the deeper recovery and trend features for players who want them. Everything you need to get started, including which watches are supported, is on the HPT home page.

Strap on the watch you already own, press start, and skate your next shift knowing it will be remembered.