Glossary · Platform
HealthKit
Definition
Apple's framework for sharing health and fitness data between apps on iOS. HealthKit acts as a central data layer, your Apple Watch writes to it, Apple Fitness+ writes to it, Tonal writes to it, MoveTogether reads from it. Everything that's HealthKit-compatible can share data through this single channel.
How MoveTogether uses it.
HealthKit is MoveTogether's primary iOS data source. When you connect via Apple Health during onboarding, MoveTogether requests read-only access. Five of the types it reads are what drive your rings and competitions: Steps, Active Energy, Exercise Minutes, Workouts, and Apple's daily Activity summary. From that moment on, anything that writes to HealthKit, Apple Watch, Tonal, Peloton, MIRROR, NordicTrack, plus 100+ Apple Health-compatible fitness apps, feeds MoveTogether automatically.
This is what makes the no-wearable path work. You don't need to buy hardware to compete; if you have an iPhone, the M-series motion coprocessor writes Active Energy and Step counts to HealthKit, and MoveTogether reads them.
Read-only is meant strictly: MoveTogether asks for no write permission at all, so nothing it does can alter the data your other apps depend on. The read request is wider than those five types, though. Alongside them it asks for heart rate, sleep and body mass. Treat every one of those as leaving your device: they are registered with the background sync service, which runs observer queries. What none of them do is affect competition scoring. Sleep and heart rate additionally give Coach Mo context, body mass draws your weight chart, and heart rate and sleep are the ones listed on the Data Sources screen in Settings.
How far back imported history reaches depends on your plan. Starter accounts (Free) include activity from the join day onward with no pre-join data. Pro accounts include up to 30 days of pre-join history. Your device or the Health app may show a wider sync window (the background service can request up to 90 days from iOS), but that is the OS-level read permission, not what MoveTogether keeps for scoring — the server drops any row that falls outside your plan's import window. You can review or revoke any category in Settings, under Privacy and Security, then Health, then MoveTogether. Revoking stops new data flowing in without touching your account or your competition history.
See healthkit in action.
MoveTogether is on the App Store. Connect a wearable (or just your iPhone) and start your first competition this week.
