Guide

Why Strava ignores Apple Health workouts — and how your runs get there anyway

You finish a run, it's sitting right there in Apple Health — and Strava acts like it never happened. It's not a bug and it's not your settings: Strava's Apple Health integration only imports activities recorded with Apple's own Workout app. Strava's help centre says it outright: activities uploaded to Apple Health from a third-party app will not sync.

Why Strava does this

Every workout in Apple Health carries the identity of the app that wrote it. Strava filters on that source and only accepts Apple's native Workout app — partly to avoid duplicate uploads from apps that already talk to Strava directly, partly by policy. No setting, permission, or metadata trick on the recording app's side changes this; Apple's own engineers confirm the filtering happens entirely on Strava's side.

The workarounds people try

How Vanoor handles it

Vanoor takes the last route: connect your Strava account once in Settings, and every finished run is uploaded straight to Strava's API as an industry-standard FIT file — full GPS route, heart rate, and timing included — moments after you save it on the Watch. Apple Health still gets its own copy, as always. No bridge app, no manual exports, no duplicates (each run is uploaded exactly once).

What if I don't use Strava?

Nothing changes: runs save to Apple Health, show up in Vanoor's own Activity history with full charts and splits, and can be exported as FIT or GPX from any run's share menu whenever you need a file.