As a non-Appleista, what strikes me most is their "silo" mentality. Most of the iPhone /iWatch using fitness types I know log their stuff inside the Apple cloud, and do not crosspost to Garmin Connect or Strava so the non-Appleistas don't see their stuff. Whereas the Garmin/Strava world is relatively open. I can for example take the original Forerunner (pictured in the article) and upload stuff from it to the Garmin or Strava cloud, albeit slightly cumbersomely. I sometimes do with a later model, a Forerunner 305, even if it does take USB download to do it.
Physical buttons, though... I've lost more than one bike ride because the start/stop button was bumped on the Forerunner and it turned out not to be recording.
> I've lost more than one bike ride because the start/stop button was bumped on the Forerunner and it turned out not to be recording.
I've had that happen to me during yoga and boxing workouts I've recorded. There's a way to lock the physical buttons (at least on my Instinct watch), which requires multiple presses to stop/start a workout. IIRC, it's by holding the light button.
An example of how Strava is geek-compatible (so far! it may get ensh*ttified in the future). I found some old GPS logs from 22 years ago, when I first got a handheld GPS and geeked out with it, logging a whole bunch of rides and hikes.
It took a bit of work to get those converted to a modern format (load into ancient tool, which is still maintained, and write out as GPX files... one at a time). But then these GPX files can be uploaded to Strava and there they are! Activities older than Strava itself, fully integrated.
Also I've more than once had a "whoopsie" - app left recording during the drive home, for example. Download activity from Strava, edit the GPX file, delete the activity and re-upload from the file.
And when you download your stuff from Strava, you get a database dump. That's both good and bad; e.g. users are just numbers and you'd need to use the web Strava to translate them to names, but all your photos and all your traces and all your stats come down in standard formats (jpeg, gpx and csv respectively) and nothing is dumbed down; everything is in the best possible format for re-import to something else.
Strava has a built in feature to trim an activity if you accidentally keep recording on the drive home. Happens all the time. You can just select the time when you want to cut it off.
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.
Garmin, 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.
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.
What 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).
There’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).
Yes, with maps. The Apple Watch Strava app will record and upload directly or you can import workouts from Apple Health, both give you GPS, HR, etc.
If recorded elsewhere it can depend, but that’s due to Strava being irritating/changing/dropping integration features in the last couple of years and not an Apple ecosystem issue.
Or those people have maps uploaded but have chosen not to make them public?
They may be less gatekeeping than others, but they don't let you get data off the device without a cloud account, at which point all your biometrics are for sale.
Just plug in the Garmin watch to your computer, and its storage opens revealing sensibly named folders. You can open the folder named Activity and copy your sport files in FIT format. Everything else is JSON.
Are you talking about Garmin? If so, that's not my experience of the two watches I have had, which let you take data directly from the device over USB (as FIT files).
Physical buttons, though... I've lost more than one bike ride because the start/stop button was bumped on the Forerunner and it turned out not to be recording.