apple watch activity distance wrong vs runkeeper & garmin

I'm not clear where Garmin is entering into this. The watch gets its GPS info from the phone. So does Runkeeper. They should be very close, if not the same. However, if you're also using a Garmin device, I'd expect to see a difference between it and the phone. In my experience, the Garmin tends to show both a shorter distance and slower pace (for the record, I run much slower than you do!). My sense has always been that my Garmin watch(es) are more accurate than the phone. Why the phone would show different information from an app also using the phone's GPS is a question I can't answer. Hopefully, Apple will have something to say.

Personally, as I have given up all hopes of qualifying for Boston, i pick one device and stick with it. My experience over time is that the phone is consistent with itself as is the Garmin. I'm less concerned about the absolute numbers than in seeing improvement over time. This approach my not work for everyone.

I'm having the same problem. I went for a run the other day on a route I'm very familiar with. It's exactly a 3 mile route but when I ran it with my Apple Watch paired with my iPhone on my running belt it says I only rain 2.5 miles. I re-verified the route distance in Google maps and other running apps on my iPhone get the distance right. It's surprising that the watch/workout app could be that inaccurate when supposedly drawing on the iPhone for GPS data.

I have this same issue. For walking, everything seems fine. However, when I'm running, the distance drifts farther off the longer I run, which completely throws off the pace and calorie calculators as well. I drew up a map of my exercise run in RunKeeper and it came out to 5.98 miles. After my run, RunKeeper estimated a 5.98 mile run, spot on. However, my Apple Watch calculated 5.84 miles.

This has nothing to do with assigning a map to RunKeeper before the fact. I've gone on another run where I didn't have a map drawn out beforehand, and Workout ended up being way off on that one as well.

What would greatly help troubleshoot this would be for the Workout app to give us the GPS map of where we ran, so we could compare and determine why it's off by so much.

I recommend anyone experiencing this issue report the problem to Apple and link back to this thread.

Well, Watch OS 1.0.1 has been released, which claims to have improved run/walk distance and pace calculations. Let's hope this takes care of our issue!

For me personally, walking was spot on, although 1) I don't walk as far as I run, and 2) I carry my iPhone in my pocket (vertically) when I walk vs. in a belt pouch (horizontally) when I run, which is something people have theorized caused issues.

I'm having the exact same issue!

Run #1 was .25 miles off on a 3 mile run. I only used one form of measurement but I have run this route dozens of times and I am very confident that 3 miles is correct. I did have my iphone 6 with me on my waist and paired to the watch.

Run #2 was a different route that I'm not as familiar with. I once again wore my phone on my waist in a runners belt. I decided to use MapmyRun using the GPS on my phone in addition to using the workout app on the watch. MapMyRun calculated as 3.15 miles and my watch calculated it as 3.01 miles. That may not sound like much of a difference but it ended up calculating it as almost 30 seconds difference per mile. That is very significant in my opinion especially considering how much time was spent during the release of the watch highlighting the fitness/runner use case. It is really weird to me that the same GPS could come up with two different distances so I suspect the issue is a software and/or algorithm issue on the watch.

Besides the accuracy issues the other thing I find frustrating is that the interface of the workout app on the phone for a run lets you pick either distance, pace, time, etc... but in reality I suspect most people (myself included) would prefer to keep some combination of those metrics on the screen to avoid having to scroll during a run.

Seeing the same issue here.

First run with phone and watch yesterday on a known route showed it was off somewhere between 0.15 and 0.2 miles after 2 miles. Further into the run, I tracked 2.25 miles between two markers and again found it was off by 0.15 miles.

In both cases, it is showing less distance than actual.

I have over 1200 miles tracked in RunKeeper and have never had a single issue, so I know this is not normal GPS issues.

P.S. The whole activity app and Health Kit experience is weak. I have yet to figure out how to even view the stats of my run yesterday. I can find the billion date points that comprise the run, and a daily summary, but the activity is nowhere that I can find. So lame.

I posted my experience and a potential workaround to this problem here:

Re: my apple watch distance is way off

Essentially, turn off Motion Calibration & Distance and give it a try!

On my AW I disabled motion calibration but still the indicated distance is way off. As I previously wrote, it's a problem of the native app, not a problem of the watch itself, because if I use Motion-X, which has an app for AW, the distance is accurate.

On my last test I run 10km on another trail whose distance had been measured with a wheel, since that course it's used for trail running competitions.

I had the AW on my left wrist, the Garmin 610 on the right wrist and I was holding the iPhone 6 in my hand. (Pretty unconfortable, but it was the sacrifice required for the test :-)

I launched the AW's native app for outdoor run, and also the Motion-X app, while on the iPhone 6 I launched the Garmin's app (Fit) and at the same time I started my Garmin 610.

Guess what: the distances measured by the AW's Motion-X app, the Garmin FIT app on the iPhone and the Garmin 610 watch were almost the same, plus or minus 20m, which is 0.2% accuracy. Very good, I couldn't ask any better.

But the native AW's application was showing 8.9km, which is over 10% error and it's unacceptable.

My guess is that the native app (at least on my AW) doesn't trigger the the iPhone's GPS, while if I use Motion-X on the same AW it does and is very accurate indeed.

I'm posting to say I have exactly the same issues here and have run tests simliar CFIMarco and found the same sizable distance shortages reported by the watch even when running with a paired iPhone. For that matter, the overall performance of the watch and the pairing seems very buggy. I know apps aren't native until 2.0 for the most part, but I can't even reliably get stock quotes or the temperature to display on the watch. it's hard to say if the software or hardware is the culprit, but I suppose I'll wait for WatchOS 2.0 and see if there are improvements. As it stands, the watch doesn't work for fitness tracking due to the 10% distance error.