A Critical Look at the Apple Watch and Why Coros is a better Backup

As an early adopter it makes perfect sense for me to have played with an Apple Watch but it doesn’t make sense that I would keep wearing it. The reason for it being absurd for me to wear an Apple watch is primarily that I managed to damage a screen on an Apple watch indoor climbing many, many years ago.

The second reason is that I already wore a Suunto watch, followed by Apple, and then Garmin, and then Coros, and Garmin, Suunto and Coros fill the niche I want them for. I want a fitness tracker rather than a smart watch. I want step counting, run tracking, cycling, and more. I rarely use IM functions. I sometimes check the weather but every modern fitness watch offers this, with built in thermometers, barometers and more.

Garmin was criticised for its 75 CHF per year add-on for people who want to track more yet Apple has the Fitness+ app for over ten CHF per month, and you need to buy extras to do cycling and other indoor sessions. I do appreciate the run coaching workouts but they are not worth 10 CHF+ per month.

After this we have plenty of apps such as Livity, Pace, Athlytic, Wahoo, Gentler Streak, Sonar, The Outsiders and more. Each of these apps wants from 30 CHF per month for at least two apps to 100 CHF per app for all of the other apps. You’re buying the Apple Watch, but then you are encouraged to spend 30-100 CHF per year for add-on third party apps that read your data and provide a different UI than the default.

This encourages consumerism, but more than that, it encourages us towards digital materialism. We don’t need all these apps because Apple already provides us with plenty of insight.

It is not just that you are spending from 220 CHF to 1200 CHF on the watch. You’re spending plenty on all of the apps that play with the Apple watch, whether it is for audiobooks, podcasts and more. I have never shared an audiobook to the Apple Watch for listening whilst without the phone. I have never uploaded music to the watch.

I won’t write, yet again, about Apple rings and pointless addiction, yet again, although this does not bring me joy, as an Apple watch user. I prefer to focus on overall fitness over time, not whether I stood every hour or not.

In theory, given that the Apple watch has dozens, if not more, fitness apps, it would make sense to use all of them, rather than the native app, but if we do that then we don’t feed that data to the native app, so we might as well use another device.

If you track a run with the Sports tracker app, Apple fitness will see the workout but not the calories. If you track the workout with the Apple watch then Sports tracker will be happy.

If you track a workout with the native app, and you allow The Outsiders to write to the Health app, then you get duplicates, as you do with Garmin and more. The irony is that you have duplicate workouts but zero calories counted, unless you wear the watch.

The issue was not with the Apple Watch. It was with the Garmin Forerunner 570 crashing during a MAS workout. The secondary issue is that COROS was not happy with the Apple Workout that had passed through Strava being downloaded as a fit file before being imported into the Coros ecosystem.

For interval sessions it makes sense to use Coros as a backup, rather than the Apple watch.