Apple Health and Health Connect

hi.fitness can exchange training data with your phone's health app - Apple Health on iPhone, Health Connect on Android. It works in both directions, and you decide on each one separately.

Open More → Settings → Apple Health (or Health Connect on Android).

Bringing activity in

Switch on Import and hi.fitness reads:

• Workouts you did outside the app - a run, a swim, a bike ride, a session your watch recorded. They appear on the matching day in the Workouts tab. Each one - a yoga class just like a run - shows its icon and, in the top-right corner of its card, a small label saying where it came from: Apple Health or Health Connect. A workout you tracked in hi.fitness has no such label. Every one gets a card of its own, with its figures and - when your phone recorded where you went - a map. Tap See details on that card and the whole activity opens up: the route on a map, your speed or pace against your heart rate over the whole session, each kilometre compared against the next, the elevation profile, and whatever else your device measured - steps on a walk, cadence and power on a ride. Drag across the chart and a pin walks along the route, so you can see exactly where you sped up or where the hill was.

Details open for every activity, not only the ones with GPS. A treadmill run, a pool swim or a yoga class has no map and no per-kilometre breakdown, but its figures are still there, and its heart rate gets a card of its own: your average and highest heart rate, and - when your watch recorded readings all through the session - their curve with your lowest reading too.

• Body weight - one entry per day, so the weight card on your home screen and your weight history fill in without you typing anything. Weights from before you joined hi.fitness are kept, but left off your charts.
• Steps and calories burned - one card at the top of the Workouts tab. Its big number is everything you burned that day, with the time your phone last read your health data under it: Burned so far · 14:32 today, Total burned for a past day your phone has read since it ended, Burned until 23:10 for one it last read before midnight. A bar under it splits the total into resting energy and active energy, with each part's share in percent, and the two figures sit under the bar - tap either one to see where it comes from, or tap the small (i) under the big number to see what the total includes. Next comes a chart of your day hour by hour from 6:00 - or earlier, if you were moving or training before six: steps and active calories as two overlapping lines. The chart needs two full hours, so on an ordinary morning it appears only after 8:00; until then your steps and active calories sit in the top right corner of the card, next to Today. Press and drag across the chart to read a single hour, then lift your finger to go back to the whole day. Workouts you recorded show up as a coloured band across the time they ran, with the activity's icon at the top. The colour stands for the kind of activity - the gym, running and walking, water sports and so on - and matches the icon. Under the chart, Activities lists what you did - each activity with its icon and name, and its calories on the right when they were measured, or estimated for a workout you tracked here without a watch - followed by your everyday movement; tap the (i) next to it to see what it is made of. Each activity opens from its own card further down. If your phone knows your active energy but not your resting energy, which can happen on Android, the big number shows your active energy instead, with no total and no bar - without the resting part a total would be far too low.
• Resting heart rate and VO2max - one reading a day, worked out by your watch. Both need a wrist device, and VO2max is only measured on qualifying outdoor walks and runs, so it arrives every few days rather than every day.
• Sleep - how long you actually slept, filed under the morning you woke up on. It answers the Sleep habit for you: reach your goal and the habit ticks itself off. A night that begins before midnight counts in full toward the day you woke up, so the habit sees the whole night. We count time asleep, not time in bed, and a night we have no data for is left for you to mark rather than counted as missed. The night shows as its own card at the top of the Workouts tab, above the day's activity summary: how long you slept, the recovery level and a sleep score. Tap it and the Sleep sheet opens. It leads with the score, from 0 to 100, and its recovery level: Full, Good, Partial, Weak or Minimal recovery. Next to it are the time you slept and your sleep goal. Under that you see what the score adds up from: Sleep duration (up to 50 points), Bedtime, compared with your usual bedtime (up to 30), and Interruptions (up to 20). Then come the Sleep stages: the night's hours, a timeline of the night and a short meaning for each stage. The sheet ends with the Last 7 nights. hi.fitness works the score out from the night your watch recorded, against the sleep goal you had that night: the one on your Sleep habit, or 8 hours if you have no such habit. Changing the goal later does not change earlier nights. The Bedtime part needs at least three earlier nights to compare with. Until then the score is worked out from the other two parts. A night recorded without sleep stages shows the time asleep but no score. Stages are recorded by a watch worn overnight.

Before your phone asks for access, hi.fitness shows one short screen explaining what it needs. Read it and tap Continue, then turn on all categories on the phone's own screen - each category has a switch of its own, and a category left off stays empty in the app.

The first time you switch it on we bring in the last 90 days. After that it updates by itself: on iPhone a new workout usually arrives shortly after your watch syncs it, even if the app is closed. On Android it updates when you open hi.fitness or pull down to refresh.

Sending workouts out

Switch on Save workouts and every session you finish in hi.fitness is written to your phone's health app. It counts toward your Apple Watch activity rings and shows up anywhere else that reads your health data. A session your watch measured goes with the calories it measured; one you tracked without a watch goes with our estimate (see Calories: which number is which below). A workout saved without a connection is sent once it reaches hi.fitness. Where a watch recorded the same minutes, your health app puts the watch's calories first.

If you delete a workout in hi.fitness (See how it went on the Workouts tab, then the three-dot button and Delete workout), the copy is removed too - even if you have switched Save workouts off since.

Every activity at a glance

Open the Workouts tab and pick a day. Every activity gets a card of its own: its name, the hours it ran, where the data came from (the label in the top-right corner), and up to six figures, each with its icon.

A walk, a run, a ride or a swim shows time, distance and calories on the top row. Underneath, what makes it that activity: average speed - or average pace for a run - average heart rate, ascent where there was a climb, and steps on foot when a place is left. Anything else - a yoga class, a sauna, a game of tennis - shows time, average heart rate and calories, and the distance when your watch measured one.

A figure your phone or watch did not measure is left out and the next one moves up, so a card never shows an empty box. When you open an activity that covers ground, its summary keeps every place and says No data for what is missing: the activity happened, so a gap is worth knowing about. A figure the activity cannot have is never listed - a pool swim has no ascent.

A run reads in minutes per kilometre, a walk and a ride in kilometres per hour - whichever way you would say it out loud. Kilometres or miles follows the units in your account settings.

Maps for runs and walks

When your phone recorded where you went, hi.fitness draws it under the figures, with a marker where you set off and where you finished.

Only outdoor activities have one - an open-water swim your watch recorded included: a treadmill run, a pool swim and a gym session have nothing to draw, so no map appears.

On Android, routes need their own permission. If your activities show up but the maps do not, open Health Connect → hi.fitness and allow exercise routes - Android asks for that separately from the workouts themselves.

Inside a run

Tap the expand button in the map's bottom-right corner and the activity opens full screen, with everything your phone measured underneath it. The map itself is a picture, so a finger resting on it or a scroll that starts there never takes you anywhere.

On an iPad or an open foldable phone held on its side, the map stays on the left, where you can move and zoom it, while everything else scrolls on the right. On a smaller phone screen the map scrolls away with the page, so everything else gets the whole screen.

• The line is coloured by pace. The strip above the chart tells you which pace each end of the scale stands for.
• Splits - every kilometre (or mile) with its pace and, beside it, your average heart rate and the change in height, each in its own column when it was measured. A last stretch shorter than a kilometre is labelled with its length, such as 975 m; the last few steps under 100 m are left out.
• Pace and heart rate over time, each with its own scale: pace on the left, heart rate on the right. Drag your finger sideways across the chart and a pin follows along the map, so you can see exactly where you sped up. A swipe up or down still scrolls the page. With your heart rate on this chart there is no separate heart-rate card: your highest heart rate is under Additional information.
• Best efforts - your fastest 1 km, mile, 5 km and 10 km inside that run, wherever they happened to fall, without counting stops.
• Elevation - the shape of the climb from start to finish, with the highest and lowest point of the route. It appears when your phone recorded the height along the whole route; your total climb is the Ascent figure in the summary at the top.

Standing still does not count against you: a wait at a crossing is left out of your moving time, out of the split it happened in and out of your best efforts.

Best efforts are for activities on foot - running, walking, hiking. A ride gets its splits too, read as speed, along with the coloured line and the charts.

Kilometres or miles follows the units in your account settings, and the splits change with it.

Duplicates are handled for you

If you track a gym session in hi.fitness while wearing a watch, both apps end up with a record of it. hi.fitness recognises that they are the same workout and keeps one entry - the one you tracked - and fills in the calories and heart rate your watch measured. You will not see the same session twice.

Calories: which number is which

The calories on a workout are what that session burned. For a workout you tracked in hi.fitness without a watch, they are our estimate, worked out from how long the workout took and your weight, height, age and sex; timed cardio and stretching count at their own rates. If your watch's measurement of the same workout arrives later, it replaces the estimate. The day has two numbers of its own, from your phone or watch:

• The big number on the day card is everything you burned that day - your resting energy, what your body uses just to keep going, plus your active energy. You see it only when your phone knows both; otherwise the big number is your active energy, and says so. The day strip above the card shows the same number.
• The active part is walking, stairs, workouts - everything you burned by moving. It is the number on the flame chip on the card and next to the flame under the bar. A workout you tracked here without a watch is not in what your phone measured, so for the time it ran the active part counts our estimate instead, when that is more than your phone measured in those minutes. The numbers then add up the way they do with a watch, and the chart rises over the workout's band.

The two do not contradict each other: the active part is inside the total, so the total is always the bigger one. Neither is the sum of your workouts - your workouts are one part of your active energy, next to all your other movement - and hi.fitness never treats them as one.

When something does not arrive

On iPhone the permission screen lists every category with its own switch, and one switch at the top that turns them all on. Switch a couple on by hand and the rest stay off - which looks like everything is connected, and is not. hi.fitness now checks right after that screen, and again whenever you switch importing on or add the Steps or Sleep habit. If it cannot see your steps, or may not save workouts, it says so: Not everything is switched on, with the way to fix it.

You also meet it where the data is missing: the Steps habit card says Steps are not arriving from Apple Health instead of showing zero, the Activity statistics screen offers Fix, and More → Settings → Apple Health shows the same line with a Fix button - that is the place to come back to at any time.

• iPhone: tap Open Health. An iPhone never shows its permission screen a second time, so this is the only way back. In the Health app, tap your profile picture in the top corner, then under Privacy tap Apps, then hi.fitness, and turn on all categories. When you return to hi.fitness it checks again and imports the last 90 days by itself.
• Android: tap Grant missing permissions. Health Connect asks again for exactly what is missing. If you cancelled its screen twice, Android stops showing it; hi.fitness then opens Health Connect's settings instead, where App permissions → hi.fitness lets you allow everything.

If steps still do not arrive on iPhone, check in the phone's settings that fitness tracking is on - the phone counts steps only with it.

Good to know

• Everything stays between your phone and your hi.fitness account. We never share your health data.
• You can turn either direction off at any time, and nothing already imported is deleted.
• Your weight history starts when you started with hi.fitness. Readings your phone recorded before that are kept, but they are not drawn on your charts or listed in your weight history. Anything you enter yourself always shows, whatever its date.
• Body fat and height from your phone are saved to your account too, but hi.fitness shows no history of them between your reports: My Progress compares only what your reports measured. When you fill in a report, a body-fat reading from the last 24 hours is filled in for you.
• Say no on the permission screen and the Import switch still moves - but nothing arrives, and hi.fitness tells you straight away; the Save workouts switch waits until saving is allowed. Fix takes you to the right place.
• VO2max has a permission of its own, so your phone may ask for it separately - saying no there costs you only that one reading, and everything else keeps syncing.
• Swims arrive with their distance. Once after you update the app, hi.fitness reads your last 90 days again, so activities imported before get what it now reads better - a swim's distance, route and heart-rate chart among them. Your phone asks for nothing new.
• Apple Health is only on iPhone; Android uses Health Connect, which may need installing from the Play Store on older phones.