Q: iPhone 6 not counting flights of stairs

My iPhone 6 plus is counting steps, distance, and flights climbed with no issues right out of box.

My wife iPhone 6 out of box was only counting steps and distance. Flight climbed was "no data" for few days (~4-5 flights climbed)

Then I found this post. Calibrating compass on the phone did the trick. Flight climbed started working perfectly. It is possible that this is coincidental and it starts after 4-5 flights. Note I did not calibrate for my 6 plus.

My iPhone 6 plus does not count flights climbed even after calibrating the compass. I'm running 8.1. Can anyone help me please? Tried climbing up and down several stairs yet no recorded data.

did you try calibrating your compass? for me it worked after calibration and/or after initial 6-7 flights...don't have silver bullet for you...just something worked for me. I am on 8.1

Its still not working for me after the update either.  If I wait a few days it starts counting some stairs, once I calibrate, it stops altogether.

However, when I am riding my bike, it randomly counts stairs.

I try to use Pedometer++ for count stairs, and it is very accurate, but in IOS heath's app, no count or only one/two stairs when in Pedometer++ see a double number.

And you?, have this difference between the two app, I don't know why...

I tested health app counts for steps and flight climbed by simply counting steps and flights myself and then cross checking. They are very accurate.

The Health App on my iPhone 6 (iOS 8.1) is consistently wrong. Compared with my FitBit (and manual counting), the Health App picks up about 90% of my steps and about half of my flights of stairs. It doesn't get distance quite right either, I guess because there's no place to put in my height or stride length. Seems pre-Beta quality to me. I hope they issue an update soon!

Flights aren't tracking well on my 6+, either. It's counting roughly a third of them, on average.

I find the steps tracking very accurate compared to the Pacer and Moves apps (I'd like to be able to sync or import my data automatically from Pacer, though).

Does anybody know what does it mean dashed line?

Yes, it means that during that time (in your case 11th - 13th) your iPhone has recorded no steps, and hence no distance (maybe because you didn't go for a walk with your phone). The slope of the dotted line is an average trend from your previously recorded steps and distances.

We're having the same problem, in this case with the health app on iPhone 6 plus. Calibrating the compass seemed to help, but, frankly, this thing in squirrelly. Why isn't Apple responding? Seems like they should acknowledge the problem (beyond carrying all these complaints in the support forum) and either suggest a fix (like calibration) or, better yet, just fix the app.

Flights climbed on iPhone 6 is innacuratley low.  I tried Fitbit for a week and noticed that it was able accurately track flights climbed.  Come on Apple, fix this!

The stairs climbed appeared inaccurate since the start, I did however count some and skipped some. The last few days it was way off, recording only 50% or less of actual stairs climbed.

When I first got the phone, I calibrated the compass, not knowing that it might have some effect. After reading this thread, I calibrated the compass again. First, I find it strange the the calibration was required within less than 1 week since it was originally set and secondly  as soon as I calibrated the compass, health recorded 1 stair count, even though I was sitting down.

There is clearly a bug here.

There appear to be two issues here

1. A delay in posting the record

2. Inaccuracy in the number of flights

I'm happy to ignore the first issue

My experience is that the number of flights is inaccurate. It would be helpful if an Apple programmer explained how the calcs worked. Is it, as several have guess based upon the height climbed (not sure how the sensor could get that accurate), or is it based upon the detection of a period of motion that equate to stair climbing?

The problem is that "flight of stairs" is not exactly a well defined unit of measure. The height difference between floors, the height of a riser, the number of risers, the presence or absence of landings, how big the landing between flights all vary, and on top of that some people will bound up stairs two risers at a time whilst others hit every step. From a health point of view the same effort is expended regardless of how I climb the stairs - if the App detects footfalls it will get a different number of flights depending upon how many risers I step upon.

So please will some Apple person explain the calculation.

I found a reference that a 'flight' is considered to be 12 feet.  Since most stair-steps are ~8", you have to climb at least 18 steps for the effort to be considered a "flight" of stairs.

This number of steps (18+) is typically true for "one floor" for most commercial buildings; many, many homes, however, only have 12-14 stair-steps per floor, which is 10' or less -- so the Health app won't consistently register that as a 'flight' of stairs.

If you have 2 sets of stairs in your home, you can confirm this by going an extra 6 steps (e.g.: if you have basement steps, go from the first floor down 6 steps, back up, then continue on to the second floor).