How An Apple A Day Can Drive You Nuts

Being of the Boomer Generation, I can easily lay claim to being something of a technophobe, though I do my best to try to understand the new technology. And don't forget all you Millenials, it was my generation that invented the bloody stuff, to begin with. Anyway...

In an effort to improve my fitness and health, I have taken up regular exercise. And I try to keep tabs on my progress by using a health app on my Apple iPhone.

As part of my new regime, every single day I go out on my bicycle for a 5km ride in the morning, and another 5km in the afternoon. The health app on the Apple records all sorts of data such as the distance I have covered, in steps, or in kilometers. If I am on my bike, it's great it that gives me a figure for both steps as well as km. I do find that really helpful in tracking my progress. Except recently I have started to notice some sort of glitch in the app.

For example, this morning I took a relatively new route which came out at 5.1 km. So, in the afternoon session, I decided to do exactly the same route with not even the slightest deviation. So I was expecting to get home and see 10.2km displayed on the app. Not so. It showed me 9.3. What was strange was that I quite often stop to take a swig of water without getting off the bike. And I always check my mileage at the same time. At 8.9km from home, I was on track to hit 10.2. So how come I only ended up with 9.3? What happened to the missing 0.9km? After a shower, I decided to investigate the app a little more and ended up totally confused.

Yesterday, on exactly the same route, according to the app, I recorded 9.9 km with 8,649 steps. Today I covered 9.3km with 9,809 steps! How on this earth can that be? It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that there is something radically wrong here. It is even more bizarre when you take into account that just before my afternoon session today, I did a pre-run warm-up of about 1,2 km. So in actual fact, I fully expected to see 11.4km, in total. So that leaves me 2.1km short!

The cause of this anomaly evades me for the moment. Could it be due to a loss of signal at some place/s on the route? Or could it be due to my Cloud storage being full? There was an alert about Cloud being full when I got off my bike at the end of the run.

The other thing that happened I arrived home this afternoon was the battery on the phone suddenly died, just as I was in the process of checking the mileage. Of course, that would still not explain how I could suddenly do significantly less km with a lot more steps!

If we have any techies here who know more about this subject, I would be very interested to hear your take on this technical mystery. If nobody knows, that's fine. It is not the end of the world that the information is incorrect since I treat it as only a rough guide anyway.

When I explained this mystery to my lovely wife, her response was "The app was free, what do you expect for nothing?" Maybe that is the way things work, you want free, you get slapdash. If you expect something to work with the precision of a Swiss watch, well you have to pay big bucks for that sort of technical expertise, matey.