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Posts tagged with "Activity"

Apple Announces Global Close Your Rings Day

April 24th marks the 10-year anniversary of the release of the Apple Watch. To mark the day, Apple has announced Global Close Your Rings Day, encouraging Apple Watch users to meet their daily fitness goals.

If you have an Apple Watch and close your Activity rings on April 24th, you’ll get a special limited edition award on your watch and animated stickers in Messages. Apple is also giving away a special pin that the company says is inspired by the award, starting April 24, while supplies last.

In a press release, Apple’s chief operating officer, Jeff Williams said:

Apple Watch has changed the way people think about, monitor, and engage with their fitness and health. A decade ago, we introduced Activity rings — and since then, Apple Watch has grown to offer an extensive set of features designed to empower every user. People write to us almost every day sharing how Apple Watch has made a difference in their life, from motivating them to move more throughout the day, to changing the trajectory of their health.

For more on the event and statistics on the benefits customers who close their rings have seen, you can read Apple’s press release here.

The New Fitness App in iOS 14

Last year Apple introduced Activity Trends, a new feature for tracking your fitness over time. Trends complemented the Apple Watch’s classic Activity rings feature, and found its home alongside the rings in the iOS Activity app.

Activity rings are binary metrics: did you or did you not meet your goal for moving, exercising, or standing today? Trends, on the other hand, track your past year of activity through rolling 90-day windows, and inform you as to whether you’re improving or declining. If necessary, Trends then suggest improvements such as walking a little more than usual each day or standing for a bit longer each hour. Together, Activity Trends and the classic Activity rings seek to help you develop and maintain an overall healthy lifestyle across a handful of monitored metrics.

Last year, Trends got their own tab in the Activity app alongside the four tabs that had existed previously: History, Workouts, Awards, and Sharing. These tabs always felt a bit sparsely populated for my tastes, and it seems that Apple agreed. In iOS 14, Apple has redesigned the Activity app, consolidating its tab structure, and renamed the app ‘Fitness.’

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