What is the expected/acceptable accuracy level of Apple Watch distance measurement? We have two series 4 watch – one mine and one that my wife wears. When we go on hike together and start "outdoor walk" exercise on both of our watches we're getting ~5% discrepancy for distance tracked. Is that expected?
Apple Watch acceptable accuracy
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Related Solutions
The health data is automatically added by the watch. If you can see heart rate data, this means your Apple Watch is sending data to the Health app properly.
The message on the screenshot you posted is a bit misleading. In this answer you'll learn how to verify that the heart rate data is being transmitted correctly and how to shut off heart rate data collection.
Seeing Heart Rate data
Open the Health app on the iPhone. Select the Health Data tab. Navigate to Vitals > Heart Rate:
If you see data, that means your watch is properly sending data to the Health app. You can make this visible on the initial screen for the Health app by toggling the Show on Dashboard switch.
Disabling Heart Rate data
You can turn off Apple Watch health data collection. Open the Apple Watch app for iPhone. Select the My Watch tab. Navigate to Privacy > Motion & Fitness. There, you can turn off Heart Rate or Fitness Tracking:
I think Apple's included Workout app can record activity and heart-rate data without the iPhone, but the Nike+ Running app can't (as of the 17th of November 2015).
Here's the info page from the iPhone Nike+ Running app (Nike+ Running > Settings > Apple Watch)..
Nike state that you need to have your iPhone on you.
Best Answer
I think this is totally expected it can happen, but not be the usual experience.
Apple has an article explaining how to start over in the calibration. If the measurements start off wrong - they won't get back to accurate in my experience and one watch I had didn't have my phone nearby when I set it up, and ended up with my step length 10% off.
I'd run through all the items from the top and see if you can get the step length accurate for the terrain you're most likely to want the numbers to be accurate. I've set up about a watch about a dozen times, and I only had one time it was off enough to need a recalibration, so it's hard to guess how common this is from anecdotal reports like yours and mine.