Finally at last Apple Health supports saving .distancePaddleSports, .distanceCrossCountrySkiing, .distanceRowing, .distanceSkatingSports, and much more.
The backstory. In the land of 10,000 lakes, there hasn't been a way to save 'canoe' or 'kayak' distance and I've been asking for it for years. Thank you health team for adding it this year!
- FB7807993 - Add HKQuantityTypeIdentifier.paddleDistance for canoeing, kayaking, etc type workouts (June 2020)
Prior we could just save the totalDistance to a workout, but since the HKWorkout initializers were deprecated we no longer have a supported way to save these distances in our workouts. The iOS 18 / watchOS 11 introduction addresses this. If you want to know more why you can't do this in earlier versions you can check these feedback titles:
- FB10281482 - HealthKit: Deprecation of totalDistance on a workout session of paddleSports breaks apps that used that to save distance to the workout because there is no "paddleDistance" type available to save as sample data (June 2022)
- FB12402974 - HealthKit: Deprecation of HKWorkout completely breaks support for third party fitness apps from saving non-standard workout distance (June 2023)
Great, so there is new support that solves all of these requests and issues for the new version of the OSes. However, the downside is now that there is not much for documentation. Unlike the .runningSpeed and .runningPower introduced in iOS 16 / watchOS 9, none of the new iOS 18 / watchOS 11 types have documentation, at all. To some degree this is understandable, but types from last year still remain undocumented too.
Without this information for the data types introduced in both iOS 17/18 and watchOS 10/11 it makes building and integrating with these new types difficult to say the least. We can't make assumptions about anything.
Can we get a documentation update for new (and existing) quantity types for when Apple Watch will automatically generate samples?
- FB14236080 - Developer Documentation / HealthKit: Update documentation for HKLiveWorkoutDataSource typesToCollect for which sample types are automatically collected by watchOS 10 and 11 (July 2024)
- FB14942555 - HealthKit / Documentation: App Update Release Issue - HKQuantityTypeIdentifiers are missing documentation describing when the system automatically adds data (today)
I know that the behavior has changed from release to release for some of these types, so documentation would be based on OS version. If you didn't catch it, watchOS 11 will now associate .cyclingSpeed for cycling workouts both indoor and outdoor.
- FB12458548 - Fitness: Connected cycling speed sensor did not save samples to health via cycling workout (June 2023 - received reply that only saved for indoor cycling, but not documented otherwise)
- FB14311218 - HealthKit: Expected outdoor cycling to include .cyclingSpeed quantity type as a default HKLiveWorkoutDataSource type to collect (July 2024)
To the other third party fitness apps out there, how are you managing the knowledge of which devices collect which data types on which versions of the OS?
Sure, we could look at the HKLiveWorkoutDatSource and inspect the typesToCollect property across a bunch of devices, but again that is trial by error not 'as documented'. Is the behavior of simulators guaranteed to match the behavior of real devices? Maybe, but also maybe not.
Fingers crossed for a nice documentation update to spell out all of the behavioral details.
Apple folks / DTS, many of the above feedbacks are addressed and I plan to update or close them after the releases this fall. Some are still outstanding.
P.S. I hope that .paddleSports gets deprecated and split into individual activity types like skiing did years ago. Their MET scores are different according to the research on the physical activity compendium site.
- FB7807902 - Split HKWorkoutActivityType.paddleSports into their own activity types (June 2020)