PaddlePalPaddlePal 2026.18
Our biggest update ever!
In this release
New Features
- Challenges: a new dedicated tab where you can take on ready-made challenges or create your own based on distance, time, or number of sessions
- Join and leave challenges straight from the home screen and watch your progress update as you paddle
- Completed challenges move to their own tab so you can look back on what you have achieved
- Export any workout as a FIT file, ready to upload to Garmin Connect
- Helpful tips now appear around the app to introduce features like PaddleSafe, Glide Score, and creating challenges
- Your Apple Watch now taps your wrist when a workout starts, pauses, resumes, and finishes
Improvements
- Pace is now calculated and shown more accurately, including live pace during races
- Distance tracking is more accurate: sudden GPS jumps are ignored, and pauses or lost signal no longer add phantom distance
- The screen stays awake while you are recording a workout
- Ending a workout on iPhone now asks you to confirm, so a session cannot be finished by accident
- Deleting a route or piece of equipment now asks for confirmation first
- Lower battery drain and memory use during workouts on both iPhone and Apple Watch
- The live workout map now draws long routes much more smoothly
- Your location dot now appears on the full-screen recording map
- Searching as a free user keeps your search text and shows an upgrade prompt instead of clearing it
- The close button on the upgrade screen now appears straight away
- Every pop-up screen now has a clear way to dismiss it
- Larger touch targets and clearer VoiceOver descriptions across the app
- Clearer wording in alerts and permission requests
- Challenge names and descriptions now appear in your language
- The Apple Watch app has been refreshed to match the latest watchOS design
Bug Fixes
- Fixed workouts recorded on Apple Watch occasionally never arriving on iPhone; transfers are now confirmed and retried until they get through
- Fixed body weight not being read from the Health app, which could make calorie estimates less accurate
- Fixed Pro features appearing locked when your device was offline
- You are now told if a workout fails to save in the background instead of it failing silently
- Fixed challenges not moving to the Completed tab as soon as you hit the goal
- Fixed pause and resume occasionally triggering twice in a row
- Fixed several animations not respecting the Reduce Motion setting
