Why do meditation apps count as exercise for Apple Watch?

They got back with me. It's on Apple:

We're aware of the issue you're describing, and agree that it is a problem. Obviously a meditation conducted with Timeless should not count toward the exercise/activity rings!

We recently explored the problem in depth. We thought that it could be fixed fairly easily, but were sadly wrong. Without getting too technical, the basic issue is that watchOS will shut down any app that is engaged for a prolonged period of time unless it is managing an exercise event (or a handful of other events that require background code execution, such as navigating). In previous watchOS versions, we were able to specify a type of exercise ("Mind and Body") that did not count to the activity/exercise rings, but with recent updates to the operating system even that type of exercise will count toward the activity/exercise rings.

We did eventually find a solution. It's rather intensive and will take a lot of work on our part, but we went ahead and added it to our road map. We think it will be a big improvement, and hearing from you reconfirms this! We're excited to build it. Again, without getting too technical: we plan to add a setting that, when turned on, makes our Apple Watch experience use notifications instead of the system exercises. It will be critical that do-not-disturb is turned off, and glancing at the watch face will show no indicator of session progress, so it is not a perfect solution.

How do I change Privacy settings for Timeless? I just tried to find this but couldn't locate where to do this. It can only write data for Mindful Minutes, not Exercise.

I did just contact them. I was looking on their website before and they had no way to contact them but they did within the app so I'll see what they say. If they can't help, I'll have to contact Apple directly. Hopefully they can erase the Exercise data while keeping the Mindful Minutes data.

Thanks!

Oh ok, makes sense. I don't know enough to know what's going on. At least they are fixing it.