Your parkrun barcode on your Apple Watch

Somewhere between the car and the start funnel, most parkrunners have had the same thought: the printed barcode is in the other jacket. There are three reasonable ways to keep it on your wrist instead, and they trade off against each other in ways that are not obvious until you have tried all of them.

The short version: a screenshot in Photos is free and clumsy, an Apple Wallet pass is tidy but fiddly to create and awkward for families, and a dedicated watch app is the one that survives a wet Saturday morning. Below is what each one actually involves.

First, why it matters

parkrun's position is not ambiguous. Their barcode guidance puts it as no barcode, no time, no exception: you are welcome to run without one and you will collect a finish token, but you will not appear in the results. Whatever you do, it has to actually scan on the day, in whatever light Saturday morning has decided to provide.

Option one: a photo in Photos

The zero-effort version. Sign in at parkrun, open your barcode, screenshot it, and it syncs to the Photos app on your watch.

It works, and it costs nothing. It is also the option most likely to let you down. You are scrolling a photo library on a 45mm screen with cold hands while a volunteer waits, the barcode is sized for A4 rather than a watch face, and one enthusiastic tidy-up of your camera roll takes it with it. Fine as a backup, frustrating as a system.

Option two: an Apple Wallet pass

This is the one people reach for next, and it works well. An Apple Wallet pass is Apple's own format for tickets and loyalty cards, so it handles the barcode rendering for you, syncs to the watch by itself, and lives somewhere you can find it under pressure.

The catch is in how a pass is made. A .pkpass file is a zip archive containing a pass.json describing the fields and the barcode, the images for the card front, a manifest of SHA hashes for every file in the bundle, and a detached cryptographic signature over that manifest. The signature has to be made with a Pass Type ID certificate issued by Apple, which means an Apple Developer account. You cannot hand-write a working pass in a text editor, and you cannot sign one on your phone.

Which is why the practical route is a third-party site that generates and signs the pass for you. dfyb.run is the best known, and some parkrun events actively recommend it: you type in your athlete number, tap add to Apple Wallet, and it appears on the watch. It is a good service, run by someone who clearly cares.

Two things to know before you commit to it. The first is that you are handing your athlete ID to a third party in order to get a signed file back, which is a small thing but not nothing. The second is families. A Wallet pass represents one card, so three runners means three passes, and finding the right one of three near-identical cards in Wallet on a watch is more scrolling than you want at 9.02am.

You also need to get into Wallet on the watch, which is a double-click of the side button. Worth practising once at home rather than discovering it in the funnel.

Option three: a watch app that does one thing

The reason we built Parcode is that the barcode is not really a ticket or a loyalty card. It is a single short string, your athlete ID, that needs to be enormous and legible on demand and then get out of the way.

So: the ID lives on the watch, the barcode is drawn on the watch, and nothing is fetched at the finish line. That last part matters more than it sounds. Plenty of parkruns finish in the corner of a park with one bar of signal and a phone somewhere in a bag, and an app that needs either is an app that fails on the one morning you needed it.

Put it on a watch face as a complication and it is one tap from the wrist raise. No library to scroll, no side button to double-click, no phone.

Barcode or QR code

Parcode can show your ID either way, and both scan. The linear barcode is the one volunteers see all morning, so it is the safe default and the one to reach for at an unfamiliar event. A QR code is the interesting option: it is square, so it uses a square watch screen far better, which means bigger, blacker, easier to read in bright sun. The scanning software takes it perfectly happily.

There is also a rotated barcode view, turning the bars ninety degrees so a linear barcode can run the long way down the display and be wider than the watch is tall.

Some practical advice that applies whichever you choose: turn the screen brightness up, and hold your wrist still rather than chasing the scanner. And if you are trying a screen for the first time at an event you do not know, bring the paper copy in a pocket. Some events still use older laser scanners, which are happier with ink than with glass.

The whole family

This is the bit that decided the design. If you are the parent in a household of parkrunners, you are not managing one barcode, you are managing four, and you are the one holding all of them.

Parcode stores as many athlete IDs as you want to add, each with a name, and you swipe between them. Scan, swipe, scan, swipe. It is a small feature that turns out to be the whole reason some people install it, and it is the thing that no approach built around one card per pass can do neatly.

So which one

If you already have a Wallet pass and it works for you, there is no reason to change. It is a good solution to a slightly different problem.

If you are starting from a printed barcode in a jacket pocket, or if you are scanning in more than one person, a watch app is less to think about on the morning. Parcode is a one-off purchase on the App Store, watchOS 10 or later, no ads, no subscription and no account to create. We do not collect anything about you, which you can read in about thirty seconds in our privacy policy.

Either way, the printed copy in the pocket is still not a bad idea for the first couple of weeks. Belt and braces have never lost anyone a result.

Parcode is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by parkrun. parkrun is a registered trademark of Parkrun Limited.

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