Active Calories

Active Calories is MoveTogether's most platform-agnostic activity signal, every supported wearable reports it, and the iPhone's motion coprocessor estimates it even without a wearable. It powers the Move ring, feeds Raw Numbers and Percentage of Goals scoring, and is the single best metric for 'how hard did you move today?'

MoveTogether does not use total calories (basal + active) for scoring, because basal burn varies by body composition in ways that aren't earned through activity. Active Calories is the fair comparison metric.

Worth knowing before you pick Calorie Burn as a scoring method: active calories scale with body mass. A larger person doing an identical workout burns more of them. That is real physiology rather than a measurement error, but it does mean a calorie race quietly favours heavier participants. For a group of similar builds that is fine and makes for a clean effort contest. For a mixed group, Percentage of Goals removes the advantage by scoring goal completion instead of absolute burn. Every supported wearable reports active calories, and the iPhone estimates them, so nobody is excluded either way.