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A Garmin watch can’t track heart rate during an Apple Fitness Plus workout, an example.

SllX 3y ago
Yeah but that’s a separate paid service tied to specific hardware, not so much an iPhone feature as an Apple TV and Watch feature. Garmin can integrate into HealthKit as well as any other fitness tracker.
- 8note 3y ago
  That is to say, they communicate directly with each other and not through the iPhone?
  - SllX 3y ago
    So IIRC, you need the Apple TV to actually participate in the Fitness+ workouts, this is used to display them and as far as I know this hasn’t changed, but if it has, someone else can chime in and correct me. The Apple Watch itself has WiFi and optionally LTE. It does like to boost off an iPhone’s Bluetooth and let the iPhone do the heavy lifting, but it isn’t required to connect to the Internet and honestly works better when it does (at the cost of battery life). So yeah, more or less, but you still need the Watch paired to an iPhone (because it is an iPhone accessory at its core), and the data is going to be logged to the Health app, and the relevant data (heart rate, workout time, whatever else gets logged for the workout) can be made available to an ecosystem of independent hardware and services. The weight my scale logs for example gets tracked by the vendor service, the Health app, and my food tracker via the Health app. Either way, Fitness+ is a premium service, not a feature of the iPhone. That it requires specific hardware doesn’t make it particularly special in this regard either.
- bitcurious 3y ago
  Apple's main fitness competitor Peloton supports non-peloton fitness bands, cadence meters, etc.
  - SllX 3y ago
    Good for Peloton. Fairly certain you still need to use their workout equipment, unless that changed. It’s a different business model.
ben7799 3y ago
Most Garmin users wouldn't ever be using Apple Fitness+ to workout. Totally different markets. The lack of sensor compatibility and lack of battery life make the Apple Watch a non-starter for a lot of the really serious fitness/sports use cases.

SllX 3y ago

Yeah but that’s a separate paid service tied to specific hardware, not so much an iPhone feature as an Apple TV and Watch feature. Garmin can integrate into HealthKit as well as any other fitness tracker.

8note 3y ago
That is to say, they communicate directly with each other and not through the iPhone?
- SllX 3y ago
  So IIRC, you need the Apple TV to actually participate in the Fitness+ workouts, this is used to display them and as far as I know this hasn’t changed, but if it has, someone else can chime in and correct me. The Apple Watch itself has WiFi and optionally LTE. It does like to boost off an iPhone’s Bluetooth and let the iPhone do the heavy lifting, but it isn’t required to connect to the Internet and honestly works better when it does (at the cost of battery life). So yeah, more or less, but you still need the Watch paired to an iPhone (because it is an iPhone accessory at its core), and the data is going to be logged to the Health app, and the relevant data (heart rate, workout time, whatever else gets logged for the workout) can be made available to an ecosystem of independent hardware and services. The weight my scale logs for example gets tracked by the vendor service, the Health app, and my food tracker via the Health app. Either way, Fitness+ is a premium service, not a feature of the iPhone. That it requires specific hardware doesn’t make it particularly special in this regard either.
bitcurious 3y ago
Apple's main fitness competitor Peloton supports non-peloton fitness bands, cadence meters, etc.
- SllX 3y ago
  Good for Peloton. Fairly certain you still need to use their workout equipment, unless that changed. It’s a different business model.

ben7799 3y ago

Most Garmin users wouldn't ever be using Apple Fitness+ to workout. Totally different markets. The lack of sensor compatibility and lack of battery life make the Apple Watch a non-starter for a lot of the really serious fitness/sports use cases.