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I have noticed very strange behavior of the rings and Activity.app when traveling. Thus the question:

How does the app deal with time zone changes, and how should it deal with time zone changes?

Some comments

  • I live in Germany and I'm currently in Japan which is 8 hours ahead.
  • The health database that can be accessed through the health app is timezones aware. This data is displayed in the lower part of the activity app and it changes if you change timezone (e.g. the non-activity of the Germany night is now displayed in the middle of the Japanese day).
  • The rings are not recomputed: Now that I'm in Japan, the rings for a day in Germany do not agree with the data that is displayed below.
  • On the travel day all hell breaks loose. There are several bugs, including the rings being shifted by one day and activity being recorded randomly for either the day that is still running in Germany, or the new day that already started in Japan, and display on the Watch and in Activity.app disagreeing significantly.
  • My awards got messed up. I did a perfect July (and got the 7/2016 award), but now that I am Japan the award changed to a perfect August:

perfect july imperfect august august awards

  • I got a perfect October (which I really did), but I did not get the perfect week for the travel week(which was in October):

No perfect week in october

Update: After a few days in Japan, something strange but illuminating happened: I got the award for July back, but I did not lose the award for August. I now have both (although I was slacking in August):

More awards

At the same time I also received the missing "perfect move week" award, credited on Sunday October 31. In tandem with this, I also got many many new perfect week awards: All the way back through my time with the Apple Watch I got a perfect week award on Sunday and another one on Monday. It appears as if it recalculated all the awards in the new timezone, and now they were credited on Monday morning, because the European Sunday night happens to be Japanese Monday morning. It did however not remove the Awards that were credited on Sundays, leading to a huge increase in awards. I possess my Apple Watch since March, for about 35 weeks that is. In that time I have no gathered a total of 24 perfect move weeks, 30 perfect exercise weeks, 57(!) perfect stand weeks, and 30 (yes, more than 24) "all perfect" weeks. Maybe when I return home to Germany I will be credited a perfect November award...

Update2: I'm being showered with undeserved awards. Today I got a "longest streak for 38 days, although 34 days ago I did not finish the move ring.

Update3: Back in Germany for a few days already. The undeserved August award is gone and the numbers for the weekly awards have also normalized to the correct values. The currently running streak is still 3 days too long.

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    The app will update based on your current timezone. I've seen issues similar to yours going back thru last year. I think it's compounded because you travel across timezone fairly frequently. It shouldn't change past activity but it looks like it does.
    – fsb
    Nov 8, 2016 at 22:05

1 Answer 1

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I love traveling but I have the same problems with my appleWatch.

I contacted the Support, It's a well known problem since the watch have launched. The "Bug" isn't fixed yet.

The Genius told me, the only way to handle that problem is to deactivate the automatic time adjustment of the iPhone and Watch.

Well it's not a satisfying solution but it works. The only problem is that you need to calculate the current time as it won’t display the correct local time.

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  • This is a workaround to avoid having one day on your watch include 36 hours of stand goals when you cross the international date line and rack up even more hour transitions in a new time zone. Great pragmatic solution even if the time problem is inelegant. I can’t believe a code fix isn’t available. But perhaps there’s a big downside to fixing this that we are all missing.
    – bmike ♦
    Jul 31, 2018 at 16:04
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    It has nothing todo with the automatic time zones. You only avoid the problem if you never switch time zones. For me it is a non-solution. I can’t have my watch display a home time zone for the entire trip.
    – Thomas
    Jul 31, 2018 at 18:06
  • @Thomas that’s right it’s not a solution. But Arm the only way to get rid of the problems you have with activity
    – Fabian Gr
    Jul 31, 2018 at 19:00
  • Today my watch received an update that was labeled time zone definitions. Hopefully this is fixing the problem.
    – ScottCate
    Jul 22, 2019 at 8:14

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