Health App Understates Walking Distance

Hi Brian Smale,

It appears that your wife's iPhone 11 is recording a different distance for a walk as compared to your iPhone 12 when going the route. Making sure that your fitness is recorded properly is essential for tracking and meeting any personal goals you have set. We're glad you reached out for help.

Take a look at the steps below for suggestions to improve the accuracy of your Workout.

Calibrating your Apple Watch for improved Workout and Activity accuracy

For additional help with the results on her iPhone reach out to Apple Support here: Get Support

We hope this helps. Have a good day!

Brian Smale,

Thank you for following up and providing the additional information about your wife's iPhone. Does she experience any issues when using the Maps app when routing to a destination? Using the resource below make sure that the health information for your wife is updated on her iPhone.

Use the Health app on your iPhone or iPod touch

While checking the accuracy of the location services and GPS check out the link here:

About privacy and Location Services in iOS and iPadOS

We would recommend following up with Apple Support with this link: Get Support

Take care!

Just out of interest I turned on my Walking and Running in Health to compare with Strava and it was quite close. I have run with this phone for 10 months so presumably it has self calibrated.

Images below.

The Strava mileage is not added to the Health mileage which I had feared.

Just to ram home the non-gps point, I just “ran” 100 metres by waving the phone up and down.

Brian Smale wrote:

I have already sent in a bug report via Apple's product feedback facility, from which I will never receive a reply, of course.

The feedback page is for submitting feedback. It is not designed for providing you with support on an issue. It's quite explicit that you won't receive a reply. If you want to further discuss the matter with support, you can use the Contact Support link at the top right of every page of these forums as Joseph recommended.

Brian Smale wrote:

With her consent, I've looked at my wife's health data in her Health app and can see nothing amiss. She has not provided all information, but there is nothing missing that could affect distance measurement. One strange thing is that under Settings/Privacy/Health/APPS, no apps are listed. Why is this? On my own iPhone the listed apps are Clock, Health and Outdooractive (a hiking app). This is an odd list. Why Clock and not Maps? Why is Health listed within its own app - very strange.

You might have your wife try resetting all settings. Settings>General>Reset>Reset All Settings. I don't know that it will work and, yes, it's annoying to have to reset custom ringtones, backgrounds, etc. However, it sometimes resolves weird issues like this.

Remember health app uses “step counting” as it jiggles in your pocket . Hence the calibration is needed and it is only an approximation. If you want ten metre accuracy you can use a free app like Strava or Polar Beats that uses gps and records your route on a map.

Distance is measured by GPS. Steps are measured by the accelerometer.

I suspect there may be a hardware issue here but, until a couple more things are investigated, that's no definitive.

Does your wife's phone's GPS seem to work properly for other things?

If you work through the health app location settings the explanation is it uses gps location “for example to find hospital locations near you”

I always understood the calibration process to link accelerometer step counting to walked distance happens in background by sampling and does not need your intervention. Therefore it will gradually improve step length calibration. To say it “uses gps” in health app is a slight exaggeration in my view.

Try Strava free app just for fun/comparison

I have been using Strava for running for 5 years on Samsung and iPhone.

Strava as standalone app gets its mapping info direct from gps.

Using my Polar watch Strava gets its info from PolarFlow app.

Health app also gets its running activity data from PolarFlow.

Health app, the way I use it, gives out nada. It just draws data in.

Now if I had Apple Watch the Fitness app as opposed to Health app may be more powerful at pushing out data.

Sounds like you have a similar type walking app to mine so the comparison will be interesting.

Remember the phone needs to recognise walking via a typical movement in the pocket or waist bag. I am not suggesting that either of you are doing this but checking social media while walking may damp out the movement and could underestimate the distance.

Talk soon.