Apple Health Integration: Why does Zwift still fail to upload the completed .FIT file?

Bugs and Support
1

Hi community and dev team,

I am writing this out of sheer frustration as a long-term Zwift user. I’ve been using Zwift for years, but I actually paused my subscription for quite some time because the broken Apple Health integration completely ruined the experience for me. I recently returned, hoping things had improved, but unfortunately, nothing has changed.

There is a massive community of Zwift users who want their indoor rides to count toward their daily Apple Activity Rings. I know plenty of riders who love posting to Strava, but still want their raw, accurate data directly in Apple Health without annoying workarounds. Zwift heavily markets its full support for the Apple ecosystem - offering dedicated apps for Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad. Yet, the actual data integration into Apple’s native health platform remains fundamentally broken.

I fully understand that implementing a flawless real-time Bluetooth heart rate bridge using the Apple Watch as a sensor is technically challenging due to Apple’s background restrictions. What I cannot understand, by any stretch of the imagination, is why Zwift seems completely unable or unwilling to simply write or sync the completed .fit-file directly into Apple Health at the end of a workout.

Before the usual “Apple haters” jump into the comments claiming this is entirely Apple’s fault or due to iOS restrictions: it isn’t. The .fit-file generated on Zwift’s servers at the end of a ride is perfect. It contains everything: power, cadence, precise duration, external heart rate data, and active calories. It seems that Zwift is not use this file for the sync with Apple HealthKit.

Much smaller third-party developers (like HealthFit, RunGap, or even the Wahoo app) prove every single day that this is a solved problem. They take the exact same finished .fit-file, push it to Apple Health as a single package, and it works flawlessly. The rings close instantly, and no data is lost.

Why do we have to pay a premium subscription fee only to use third-party apps as digital bridges just to fix a basic sync issue that has been reported in these forums since 2019?

Please, live up to your promise of supporting the Apple ecosystem. Stop relying on faulty real-time streaming to the Health database. Implement a proper, package-based .fit-file upload at the end of the ride, just like every other modern fitness app does.

Thank you very much for your attention :sweat_smile: .

Regards,

Patrick

2

I have no objection to your suggestion to work on this, however if you want the integration now, you could look at this topic for one workaround.

3

I completely agree with you. As user, for me, is a priority to have a direct integration with Apple Health. I can’t understand why I need a FREE third party app (I use intervals.icu) to do it, when I pay for Zwift. With thousand apple users, shouldn’t be a priority to ZWIFT?

4

Thank you so much, Paul, for pointing me towards this workaround! I tried it, and if it works as expected, this is exactly what I have been looking for.

Honestly, if I had known about this last year, Zwift could have made quite a bit more money from me… :sweat_smile: Your workaround actually makes me want to use Zwift again, which I honestly didn’t expect.

That said, I still find the situation itself incredibly disappointing. Not because of this workaround — quite the opposite, I am genuinely grateful that you pointed me towards it — but because Zwift apparently still hasn’t managed to fix such a fundamental Apple Health integration issue after all these years.

What frustrates me even more is the attitude towards the problem. It sometimes feels as if Zwift is treating this as something that simply isn’t important enough to fix, rather than acknowledging that the current implementation is flawed and should be corrected. And that is difficult to understand when Zwift charges a premium monthly subscription fee.

When a completed ride already exists as a perfectly usable .fit-file containing the relevant data, and other developers can take that file and reliably write it to Apple Health, continuing to leave users dependent on workarounds feels, frankly, like an embarrassment for a product at Zwift’s price level.

So: thank you again, Paul. Seriously. Your workaround may have just won Zwift a customer back. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: If anything, I think Zwift should give you something for that — you may have just earned them more subscription revenue than some marketing campaigns do. :wink:

I just really hope that, in parallel, Zwift will eventually decide to fix the underlying problem properly instead of expecting the community to work around it.

Thanks again for your help!
Patrick