Skip to main content
On an iPhone, Apple Health is where nearly everything ends up. Your watch writes to it. Many third-party apps write to it. The Workbench reads from it.

​
Connecting

Automatic during setup. You will have granted access at the Health permissions step. Nothing else to do. If you skipped it or denied something, that page explains how to fix it — including the Blood Pressure switch iOS quietly leaves off.

​
What you get from an Apple Watch

Good coverage: sleep with stages, heart rate, resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, wrist temperature on newer models, workouts, steps, active and basal calories.

​
The one thing it cannot give us

Time to Sleep will always show a dash for Apple Watch. It is not missing, broken or a permissions problem — Apple simply does not provide how long you took to fall asleep, and there is no way for any app to obtain it.
If you also wear an Oura ring, that figure appears from Oura.

​
Watch-only, on purpose

The Workbench’s Apple sleep figures come from your Apple Watch alone. This will sometimes disagree with Apple’s own Health app, which blends whatever wrote sleep data — including your Oura ring, if it also writes to Apple Health. Apple shows you a merged picture; we deliberately keep sources apart so that “Apple sleep” means the Watch and nothing else.
That separation is the whole point. A merged figure is more convenient and tells us nothing about what an Apple Watch alone can actually do.

​
If your watch charges overnight

You will get no sleep data for that night, and the app will show a gap. That is correct behaviour and genuinely useful to us — see Please do not perform.

​
iPhone without a watch

Still worth connecting. Your phone counts steps and distance, and any app writing to Health — a scale, a blood pressure cuff, a sleep app — becomes readable.

​
Known quirks