Automating Fitbit sync to Apple Health

Hey there - I’ve been running an IFTTT widget for a long time that would synchronise data from my Aria scale to Apple Health.

Since iOS 13 it has (sort of) stopped working. It will synchronise if I manually run the widget but if it relies on the automation it says it runs but doesn’t update Health.

Anyway.

This got me thinking about other solutions. I used to use a Viticci-recommended App called “Sync Solver” to do this and am considering going back to it.

That said – there are a few apps that do this now…

Power Sync for Fitbit
Fitbit to Apple Health

I’m happy to pay to solve the problem - and these are both paid apps. What I don’t know is if these are automation friendly. Has anyone used these or rolled another solution?

I’ve used both Sync Solver and Fitbit to Apple Health. I changed from FitBit to Garmin over the holidays, but as of late December '19 both were roughly equivalent in the metrics sync’d. A few observations between the two …

  • Sync Solver didn’t do anything with heart rate. It didn’t register access to any of that.
  • FtAH will do Resting HR but not all day HR.
  • both sync most other metrics as a single data point (total or average, as needed)
  • data sync’d are timestamped 23:59 … which means the data from SS/FtAH override data from other apps in the Apple Health display (or other summarizing apps that use Apple Heath data).
  • both sync over sleep as “time in bed” and “time asleep”
  • SS was a bit faster to complete the sync than FtAH. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that had something to do with the way heart rate data needed to be managed.
  • FtAH had something called “single click sync” … which opened the FitBit app, forced a sync, returned to FtAH, and ran a sync. It was interesting but I didn’t use it much since I was in FitBit multiple times a day anyway.
  • Neither app had very robust Siri Shortcuts support. The most I could ever do was to have Shortcuts open the app as part of my morning and evening routines. In the end that was sufficient for me.

Another thing I tried was to use another app as a “bridge” between FitBit and Apple Health. There’s a list of compatible apps here, though I can’t say whether any of them can pull over weight data as I never tried for that metric. In the end I gave up on this as it only made sense for an app I was using multiple times a day anyway. Otherwise I was opening an app just to force a sync, so I might as well open a syncing app to do it. But if there’s an app on that list you use anyway you might be able to make it work for you.

Note that all of this is as of Dec-2019 when I stopped using FitBit. I don’t know what has changed in any of the three apps since that time.

Hope that helps a little.

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Thanks, Sam! That’s useful info!