Pindingo (https://pindigo.app/) has a seductive pitch for PGM members: “Share your scores. Follow your friends. Compare and compete.” but is it better than Scorbit, PinballMap or Pinside? Pinside doesn’t have a mobile app like the others, but yes, you can leave your best pinball scores on your Pinside. There is another option which I personally prefer: Stern Insider Connnected, but unfortunately that only works with Stern Spike 2 machines (of which there are 22 as of this writing, with Venom being the newest). The reason I like Stern most is because I don’t have to take any photos after the game is over and/or try and remember to enter my score into a third party app, only login before playing with QR code.
When playing pinball, I prefer to focus on playing pinball and (distant) secondarily entering in scores. Stern’s system tracks the scores for me automatically, so I can check it out on their website or in the app later, after playing. Scorbit can work that way too, if the operator has bought, installed and activated a Scorbitron in the pinball machine, but I’ve encountered to date not a single machine in our area that has done this, making the score tracking a manual process.
The Pindingo menus are pretty straightforward, with clicking on the lower right corner profile icon will allow entering in a score. The app notifies that if you want your scores to be ranked, a photo is required. As mentioned above, not something I’m super excited about doing while I’m focused on playing. Also, finding the photo on your phone if you take a bunch of pics and vids like me can sometimes be a challenge, since the pic size is small on the screen and a bunch of similar pinball photos look similar to each other.
The primary problem with this application is competition. Just too many alternatives out there that are both better known and provide additional value. Pinside (https://pinside.com/), previously mentioned, tracks all things pinball, including high scores, where to find pinball (a tie-in with Pinballmap API), pinball machines owners, a marketplace, and so on. We’re not even talking about iScored sites for entering in high scores. What we need is one place that submits to all of these other places our personal best, sort of an aggregator/submitter.
How are you entering in your personal best scores? Or are you not bothering with any of it, just playing, learning the tables, improving skill? For me, anyway, tracking my personal best score is part of improving my skill. Feel free to share in the comments what you’re using primarily to record your pinball scores?