Ben Dodson

Freelance iOS, macOS, Apple Watch, and Apple TV Developer

Adding Exercise Data To Activity

I’ve been using the health features of the Apple watch a lot recently but today is the first time it has stopped me from doing a specific exercise. I was planning on going for a swim but obviously I don’t want to do that with my watch on. I assumed I’d be able to either enter the workout directly into the Health app (or use a 3rd party app to add the data to HealthKit) and that would then count as part of my 30 minutes of exercise on the Apple Watch; unfortunately this is not the case.

I’ve tried with manual data entry and 3rd party apps1 but there is no way for workout data not created on the Apple Watch to be used as part of your Activity… yet. On checking the WWDC keynote, Kevin Lynch mentions that this feature is coming as part of watchOS 2. Specifically he says that “workouts with these [native on the Apple Watch] apps will count” - I’m assuming that any app that uses HealthKit will actually count but we’ll see. I’m not going to install a potentially buggy watchOS 2 on my Apple Watch one week before Apple Pay comes to the UK!

  1. I even built my own basic app to add data into HealthKit with the “user entered” flag set to false in the hope that this was the piece that meant the Apple Watch ignored it. ↩︎

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