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What strikes me is that I alread have a central authoritative store of health and fitness information on my Apple devices bundled directly into the operating sy
by stouset 2y ago
What strikes me is that I alread have a central authoritative store of health and fitness information on my Apple devices bundled directly into the operating system but every single app in that category wants me to use them as the single database of truth instead. Even when they have integration with Health!
Everything goes into Apple Health but individual apps can barely talk to one another. Oura won’t pull heart rate data from Apple Health, so when I track my lifting workouts on my watch (a ring is a no-go for barbell work) it’s not there. Same for my Polar chest strap which I use during judo and BJJ. Oura is completely blind to this despite the data being available and it having access through Health.
Strava only pulls in workouts for apps that have been directly connected to it. So I have to have n:m connections between apps with this model, and only get sync between apps that have explicit Strava integration. For Garmin cycling workouts this works okay. When I integrate with Polar workouts, Strava insists on reduplicating the data back into Apple Health a second time. I have yet to find a way to get the data into Strava but have it recorded once instead sold zero times or twice.
Garmin directly refuses to use anything not recorded from their own devices. It won’t import sleep from my Oura or Withings trackers, heart rate from anything else, etc. Want to use any of the derived metrics in their app? Sorry, you'll need to exclusively use Garmin devices for everything in order to have all that data in place.
The only thing that isn’t a complete shitshow in this entire ecosystem is Apple Health.
- jamespo 2y agoWhat's it like getting data out of Apple Health?
- stouset 2y agoThere’s a very easily-discovered button to export everything. It goes to some sort of XML format that I haven’t bothered to inspect but which I assume others have written extractors for. I don’t think I really care all that much though. Other than older heart rate data from my watch and workouts recorded on my watch, all the data is already stored in the apps that created it: Strava, Oura, Garmin, Polar, etc. If I went elsewhere, those apps will still have all their own collected information. I don’t mind that those apps are the source of truth for stuff collected from their own devices. I just want them all to share data with and communicate to one another through Apple Health instead of insisting they can only use data they directly collected (Garmin, Oura, Polar) or requiring direct integration between every pairwise set of apps (Polar, Strava).
- iosguyryan 2y agoNot hard at all.
- canucker2016 2y agoGarmin, Polar, and Strava existed before Apple Health/Watch were released. They had to have a solution in a non-Apple world, and I doubt they'd abandon existing users once Apple appeared (and stuck around). Oura's first Ring was released the same year as the Watch, so I don't think that Oura was given early access.
- stouset 2y agoI’m not asking them to abandon anything. Apple Health has been around over ten years. Oura could have figured out in the intervening time how to read heart rate data from Health. All I’m asking for Strava, Garmin, and the rest is to just use Apple Health to import data from other sources and assume that it is the source of truth for externally-generated data rather than requiring direct app-to-app integration or simply ignoring anything their devices didn’t emit.
- robterrell 2y agoWhat are you not getting imported? Strava does import activities from Apple Health and it's treated no differently than an activity recorded in the app. (Feel free to email me with details, my first name at strava dot com).