Q: iPhone 6 not counting flights of stairs

I am using an iPhone 6 and iOS8.0.0.  After having the phone for several days I turned on the individual Show-On-Dashboard items for Steps, Flights Climbed, and Walking+Running Distance.  A day later I had data on all three.  Flights climbed was 14 at the start.  I went to look at the data.  It appears to have recorded one entry of 14 flights.  I delete that entry and then went up and down my steps at home several times.  No counts.  The next day I noticed that it had recorded a data entry of 1 flight at the beginning of my work day when I arrived at our 3 story building.  My office is on the 2nd story.  At lunch it added another flight of stairs.  I went to the stair well and walked down a flight, then up two flights.  It recorded two separate data points with 1 flight each at that time.  It didn't show up for a while.  I looked immediately after doing the two flights and it didn't show and then several hours later I noticed that it had counted those flights as two separate data points at the same time-stamp. 

I went home and did my home stairs 3 times.  After 24 hours it still hasn't noticed those. 

I suspect the machine needs the commercial flight height in order to work.  Perhaps the engineers in California all live in ranch houses and work in commercial multi-story buildings?  I've seen weirder software bugs. 

I just now updated to 8.0.2    If I get new data that is unique to this thread I will post again. 

   Tadd

I haven't really tried yet. Just got my + yesterday. I use a fitbit, so I was really hoping that information would pull into the health app. I guess it will eventually?

OK so i've been testing this with iOS 8.0.2 and guess what? Its now worse than 8.0.0. Before I was quite impressed with the stairs tracking, even though I get the impression that American flights are higher than in the UK because for every 4 flights I climb, it only records 3. Users should definitely be able to calibrate this stuff themselves, or is a flight of stairs now an international unit?

Anyway, since updating, i've been up 12 flights of stairs of which 4 were registered. So I tested it and walked another 4 flights of which none were registered. So, I decided to manually add 2 flights of steps and the total only increased by 1.

Sensors like this are supposed to be fool proof and robust, and i'm sure Apple engineers are fully capable of handling the data coming out of them, so what on earth is going on here? I hope they sort this out soon because for the first time ever (apart from a few minor glitches) I have a piece of apple hardware that feels like i've dropped it in the sea.

If you add 2 flights and it only shows 1, then I think you have identified a problem.

American stair flights are not consistent.  My wild guess is that you will find flights of 8 to 20 feet depending on the building. 

I don't think they can afford to have the flight-height be adjustable per-phone as this would corrupt the meaning of the result.  Perhaps they could have done something specific, like 10s of feet of climb or something.

Is there a sensor monitor app that shows the raw values from the barometer?

How does this thing know we are not jogging in an elevator? 

Just wondering. 

   Tadd 

I had the same problem that nothing was recorded and that no data source ( the iPhone itself) was registered in the section for flight of stairs.

After a soft reset it starts working!

ps  Maybe the reason was that I did a restore from my 5s to the iPhone 6.

You are right, stairs was near spot on with 8.0 and it's gotten worse with 8.0.2 where I will go up 50 stairs and it will report 1 floor.

Since the stairs app only appears to record "whole" flights (smallest is 1 no fractions/decimals like in distance), I was also wondering if 2 half flights equal 1 flight or do you have to do a minimum of one flight at one time to get a recording.

I Walked up four flights today so far, and it only recorded the first two. Why is it skipping floors?

So I have noticed a few things. My stars at work have only 8 steps and no matter how many times I go up it never counts anything. My stars at home have a landing after 9 steps and I stop to open the gate, then go up the final 3. It never counts either of these. I am thinking it must require a specific number of steps all at once to count as a flight. Any breaks in the step count and nothing is recorded.

On another note, I walked up a hill and it counted it as several flights of stairs.

I Have 15 steps from the first floor to the second, in my house. No landng.

To EclecticAgent,

How did you change your walking distance from Kilometres to Miles, I'd like to change mine to miles but can't see any settings to change in the Heath app or settings menu.

Thanks

Tony

I'm not having any luck with my iphone 6, tried already upgrading to 8.0.2, soft reset, hard reset going back to factory default and restoring afterwards, and after a few days waiting, the Health app keeps not tracking anything or even storing any data (i.e. manually input weight).

Hardware is ok, as other apps such as Argus os Sleep Cycle track steps and sleep well, and after restoring to factory default, the app works as well tracking steps (didn't check flights), but whenever I restore a backup from my old iphone 5S, the app stop gathering any data.

Unless anyone has any other suggestion, I guess I just need to wait for a fix at some point.

Thanks for the feedback!

Alan

I'm not having the problem you are having.  I have a different issue with my iphone 6.  It seems to corrupt its settings.

Regarding your problem, May I suggest you contact Apple?  You have an obviously brand new product and you get free support on it.  If you go to this link and then look for iPhone hardware and on-line chat, they will take your information and if they can't give you an easy fix they'll make a schedule with you to telephone you.  Please tell us what they say.

http://www.apple.com/support/contact/

Thanks.

   Tadd