Apple Watch, iPhone, Health and Activity

[TRICKorDEVICE]

Do these all work together seamlessly, and in conjunction with each other. For instance, if the watch doesn't pick up some steps for some reason, but the iPhone does, will the watch pull the missing steps from health and add them to the step fitness totals for Activity?


Second, I have switched to using Activity for tracking all of my runs. However, I still manually enter the runs into Nike+ running, as that has all of my historical run data for several years, my friends are on there, etc.

I've noticed that the watch and Nike+ both write to Health for the same run. I could revoke Nike+'s Health writing privilege. But is there any harm or chance of improper stats if I continue to allow Nike+ to also write to Health - do I have to make sure when I enter my runs into Nike + that the exact date and time are accurate?

 

[spotman]

The short answer is, it's a bit complicated.

The "activity" app on the Apple Watch, and on the iPhone appear for me to be based purely off of movement and calories recorded solely on the Apple Watch.

For example, if you leave your watch at home, and use other apps such as strava, or the iPhone's own motion tracking, your Health App on your iPhone will increase in steps and other metrics, but since your watch was not invited to the party, it has no idea.

But, if you do wear your watch, and record activity on it, it's activity will end up in Health App, just like other apps.

So at the end of the day, Health App is the place where everything is stored and aggregated. But not all apps (apple watch, included) read this data out of Health App.

(And, not all apps, write data into Health App).

I hope that in a future update, when you look at something like "how close am I to finishing all the rings" on the Apple Watch, that it includes activities that it was not invited to, as long as they are in the Health app. But, it doesn't do that currently.

Cheers