Above: DeepAI's attempt at an exercise bike on a road with that road on the screen of the exercise bike. Fifth try. Meh. https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img
UPDATE 26 Jan – turns out the lack-of-sync'ing issue began again a few days after the reinstall. After a quick back-and-forth with Roberto about possible conflicting bluetooth devices, I didn't sync the BowFlex Heart Rate Armband that came with the bike (and that I'd been using all along). QZ Fitness on the Apple Watch read the watch's heart rate info, fed it back to the iPhone for that record (full fit file), and all the heart rate, distance, and calorie data wrote to Apple Health in 2 seconds after hitting the "Stop" button on the watch. Now have a slightly different device doing the heart rate monitoring (one would hope the data would be comparable), but also all the devices (including the Bowflex C6) talking. Happy camper.
Maybe this post saves Roberto Viola (qzfitness.com), who I have found to be both a highly competent and exceptionally responsive developer, from another five-part email exchange. His QZ Fitness app for iPad and Android (well, a Kindle Fire) was the foundation of my data junkie fitness routine in 2024 and I've only now decided to link it into my Apple Health tracking through my Apple Watch (there's a load of product placement for you) to collect even more data I'll never get around to properly processing.
The issue arose when I would (as is the required order):
- Start the QZ app on the iPhone
- Start the QZ app on the Apple Watch (selecting "Bike")
- Ride
- Hit "Stop" on the Apple Watch
- Hit "Stop" on the iPhone
The intention was to have the QZ Fitness data from the Apple Watch (therefore, from the iPhone through its connection to my bike) written into Apple Health, but only the Heart Rate data was being written. For the length of the workout, I expended zero calories (because it was overwriting the Apple Health calorie tracker with the zeros that the QZ app was producing from not writing that info out) and Apple Health showed I had not moved a muscle.
Rapid-fire email exchange – the issue, which Roberto has seen before, was likely due to a caching issue on the watch that was best solved by uninstalling and reinstalling the QZ Fitness app on the Apple Watch.
Uninstall, reinstall, do a quick bike ride and voila (no pun intended), calories began ticking upward for the ride. That said, the final write-out of this data is not instantaneous (for the calories, anyway). Heart Rate and Time (now also fixed) will, however, update the watch rings quickly.
And 5 stars/100% review for the entire QZ line. I use it semi-religiously with a Bowflex C6 and couldn't be happier.