How to choose a tennis analysis app
Every one of these apps has to answer one question first: where do the numbers come from? There are three answers, and the one an app chooses decides what you must own, what you must do, and who is left out.
The three ways an app gets its numbers
| Approach | What you need | What it gives | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|---|
| A watch or a racket sensor | A supported smartwatch, or a sensor on the racket. Charged, paired, and worn for every match. | Shots detected while you play, with no upload afterwards. | The hardware, and the ecosystem it belongs to. A player with the wrong phone cannot use it at all. |
| Video and recognition | A phone or camera that sees the whole court. Nothing worn, nothing attached to the racket. | Shots found and labelled after the match, against the video, so every call can be checked and corrected. | You record the match, and the analysis follows it rather than running live. |
| By hand | A person who is not playing, with a score sheet or a tagging app. | Exactly what that person counted. | Their whole attention for two hours, and the count stops when it lapses. |
Tencoline is the second row. The rest of this page is what that choice means in practice.
Do I need an Apple Watch?
Not for Tencoline. It reads the video of the match, so the only thing you wear is what you would wear anyway.
Products built on the first approach in the table detect shots from the movement of your wrist, so a watch is not an accessory there: it is the sensor, and without it there is nothing to detect.
Does it work on Android?
Yes. Tencoline is a website, not an app in a store. Any phone, tablet or computer with a browser can upload a match and open the result, and the phone that recorded the video does not have to be the device you review it on.
This is the part that decides it for many players. An analysis that depends on one manufacturer's watch is closed to everybody who does not own that watch, whatever the quality of the analysis.
Do I need a sensor on the racket?
No. Nothing is clipped to the racket, the grip or the strings, so the racket plays exactly as it did before, and there is no second battery to remember.
What do I record the match with?
A phone is enough. Put it where the whole court is inside the frame and leave it there. A tripod, a fence mount or a bag against the fence all work.
The recording decides the quality of everything afterwards. A camera that sees half the court hides half the shots, and no analysis recovers them.
What does Tencoline give you after the match?
Automatic shot marks: each shot found in the video and labelled with its type, on a timeline you can jump through.
A statistics panel built from those marks: winners, unforced errors, the ratio between them, first serve percentage and break points.
An estimated shot speed, measured from the time between two contacts and the length of the court. It is an estimate from the video, and it is not a radar reading.
The review tools around them: comments and drawings on any moment, a highlights export, and a share link for a coach.
What does it not do?
No line calling. Tencoline does not judge whether a ball was in or out, and it is not a review system.
No radar. The speed is estimated from the video, as described above.
Nothing during play. The analysis runs on the recording after the match, so there is no live score and no sound on court.
What does it cost?
Uploading, marking shots by hand, drawing, commenting, the match summary and sharing are free. What you pay for is the automatic marking: €9 a month for 4 matches, or a single match on its own.
There is one free run per account, which marks the first 5 minutes of one match. Free accounts upload up to 30 GB a month.