How to compete with friends who have different fitness wearables

You and three friends want to run a step or activity challenge. One of you has an Apple Watch, one swears by their Garmin, one lives in a WHOOP band, and one just tracks everything on their Oura ring. The moment you try to set it up, you hit the wall: almost every fitness competition is locked to one kind of device.

Here's why that happens, and how to actually run a fair competition across mixed wearables without making anyone buy a new watch.

Why Apple's built-in sharing won't work

Apple's Activity sharing is genuinely good — if everyone you compete with owns an Apple Watch. That's the catch. Activity competitions live inside the Fitness app and read Apple Watch ring data, so the moment one friend is on Garmin or Fitbit, they simply can't join. There is no "invite an Android friend" or "invite a WHOOP user" button, because the feature was never built to look outside Apple's own hardware.

Most third-party competition apps have the opposite problem in a different shape: they pull from one data source well and treat everything else as a second-class citizen, or they only count steps, which throws away the cyclist and the rower entirely.

The real problem: every wearable counts differently

Even if you could get everyone's numbers into one place, raw numbers don't compare cleanly. Apple, Garmin, Fitbit, WHOOP, and Oura each estimate calories with their own model, set their own activity goals, and define a "workout" slightly differently. A 500-calorie day on a Garmin is not the same effort as a 500-calorie day on an Apple Watch.

• Calories — vendor-specific models that routinely disagree by 20–40% for the same activity.
• Goals — your Move goal and your friend's Move goal are personal, so "hit your goal" isn't the same bar for both of you.
• Steps — the most portable metric across devices, but useless for swimmers, cyclists, and rowers.

So a fair cross-wearable competition needs two things: one place that ingests every device, and a scoring layer that normalizes the differences instead of pretending they don't exist.

How MoveTogether makes it fair

MoveTogether is built specifically for this. It syncs activity from Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, Strava, and Polar — or just an iPhone — into one live leaderboard, then scores everyone on the same basis so the device you happen to own doesn't decide who wins.

The honest one is Percentage of Goals. Instead of comparing raw calories between vendors that don't agree on what a calorie is, it converts each person's day into a percentage of their own goal-equivalent — so effort competes against effort, not hardware against hardware. (If your whole group is on the same kind of device, you can use raw Move, Exercise, or Step scoring instead.)

Setting it up, device by device

Each person installs MoveTogether on their iPhone and connects their tracker once. After that, steps, workouts, and calories sync automatically — no manual entry.

Apple Watch (and iPhone-only)

Connects through Apple Health, so anything that writes to Health counts — Apple Watch, plus Tonal, Peloton, and 100+ apps. No watch? An iPhone in your pocket still tracks steps and counts.

Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, Polar

Each connects directly with a one-time sign-in: Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, and Polar. After you authorize it once, syncing is automatic.

Fitbit and Strava

Fitbit connects directly, and Strava works too — useful if some friends are runners or cyclists who already log everything there. If you're weighing Strava as your main app, the Strava vs MoveTogether breakdown covers why most people end up using both.

What if some of us are on Android?

Being straight about the current limitation: MoveTogether is iOS-only today, so your friends need an iPhone to join. Android is on the way in Q3 2026, with Pixel Watch and the broader Google Health ecosystem supported at launch. If your group has Android users, the practical move right now is to start on iOS and add them when Android ships — you can join the waitlist on the Android page.

Frequently asked questions

Can Apple Watch and Garmin users compete in the same challenge?

Yes. That's the entire point of MoveTogether — Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit, WHOOP, Oura, Strava, and Polar all feed one leaderboard, and Percentage of Goals scoring keeps it fair across devices.

Do I need a wearable at all?

No. An iPhone alone tracks steps and basic activity through Apple Health, so a phone-only friend can still compete — they'll just be scored on what the phone can measure.

Is it free?

Yes — friends, competitions, and activity tracking are free for everyone. A Pro subscription adds Coach Mo (the AI coach), advanced analytics, and more, but you don't need it to run a real competition.

How often does it sync?

Automatically in the background once a device is connected. No screenshotting step counts into a group chat.

Bottom line

The reason mixed-wearable challenges are a pain isn't your friends' gear — it's that most apps were built to count one ecosystem. Put everyone in one app that ingests every major tracker and normalizes effort instead of comparing hardware, and the Apple Watch vs Garmin vs WHOOP problem just disappears.

See every supported wearable, or grab the app and start a competition with whatever your friends already wear.

iOS today; Android arrives Q3 2026. Supported integrations: Apple Health, Fitbit, Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, Strava, and Polar.

Stop reading. Start competing.

MoveTogether is free on the App Store. Bring whatever wearable you've got — or just your iPhone.