prime winner

Hello. Can you gals and guys suggest apple apps that will sync my rides with the apple activity app after tracking with my apple watch?

My main desire is to have a phone app I can use on rides to track distance, current speed, avg speed, etc, without having to look at my watch. But I also want to be able to see my ride history post ride as well.

Thank you!

John_V 

Take a look at Cyclemeter. Fully Apple Watch integrated. It even allows you to customize the pages you view on your watch.You will need the Elite version but it only costs $10.00 per year.

prime winner

Thanks for the info John. I tried the Cyclemeter app and I had a few issues, over the course of several tries.

1. Sometimes my heart rate would not get picked up on the phone app. And sometimes the heart rate would drop for a couple of minutes.
2. The distance was off. I did a 10 mile ride that I stopped on the phone at 10.04 miles. When I got home and reviewed the ride the distance was shown as 10.11 miles.
3. The calories burned was almost double what my apple watch shown for my previous 10 mile ride.


So at this point I guess I will need to ditch the effort to find an ios app that syncs with my apple watch, while showing data on my iphone, and go with a cycling computer. Or get a heart rate strap for my iPhone and use a cycling app?

DrIsotope

You do realize that's a difference in distance of about 370 feet-- a margin of error of 0.07%.

Any HR-based calorie number is going to be suspect. It's slightly better than a guess.

If you're riding a lot, it just makes sense to buy a dedicated GPS cycling computer.

John_V 

The problem with using a heart rate monitor for calories is that the result is always calculated. And the problem with that is that there are several formulas used to calculate calorie burn. If you are comparing your calorie burn between your watch and the app, I would expect that there would be a difference, I use a strap based HRM, which tend to be more accurate than wrist based units. My Bolt will calculate my calorie burn for a ride but when the ride is sent to Strava, the calorie burn is different because Strava recalculates from the uploaded data and uses a slightly different formula. If you want spot-on calorie burn and are willing to dish out the money, a power meter is the way to go.

As for the distance, I'm not sure why that small difference is that important. When I run my Bolt and Cyclemeter simultaneously, there is always a difference in distance. Both the Bolt and my iPhone are connected to the same speed sensor so you would think that they would be exactly the same but they seldom are. I usually go with the longer distance so it looks like I've accomplished more.

prime winner

Thanks DrIsotope and John. I was looking at the issues as a package deal but I guess for $10 a year is not bad. My main desire is to be able to see my heart rate and the phone screen is much easier to look at compared to my wrist. I'll probably go back to it and love with the issues instead of buying a computer.

sierrabob

I am a little confused here. Does the Cyclemeter iPhone app display HR data from the Apple Watch optical HR sensor while riding? I didn’t think that was possible. Perhaps the Cyclementer iPhone app is mirroring the Cyclementer Apple Watch app? Many people have struggled with the problem of broadcasting HR data from the Apple Watch. There is no heart rate broadcast setting on the Apple Watch, right?

John_V 

Apparently, the Cyclemeter folks figured out a way to do that. On Cyclemeter's Apple Watch setup page there is a switch for Heart Rate Monitor (ON/OFF) and below the switch, it states, "Record heart rate from Apple Watch during session."

fourfa

This is correct - @OP this is no worse than the accuracy using standard bike computers with GPS and speed sensors. When I bring that data into Strava, Strava compares to their built-up database from innumerable rides tracked with various devices, and apply a correction factor, usually no more than a few percent. How does my computer, or strava's averages, or your Apple Watch compare to ground truth? Impossible to say without actual survey equipment. Car odometers are only good to 1-2%.

In short, don't worry about this part, it's fine.