How to share your iPhone and Apple Watch Activity Rings and workouts with your friends

Find out how to use Activity Sharing on your iPhone and Apple Watch to share your daily Activity rings with your family, friends, trainer, or coach. You can use this to compete with them for motivation, or let them track your daily activity progress.

Activity Sharing on iPhone with friends

Motivation through social engagement is an important factor in changing fitness and health behavior.

Apple’s Fitness app on iPhone and the Activity app on Apple Watch include a social feature that encourages some friendly competition by pitting your own fitness data against folks who are willing to share it with you. This lets you see if you can beat a friend in closing all three Activity rings, let your trainer to keep an eye on your daily progress, and so forth.

What kind of data is shared?

The following data may be visible to whomever you choose to invite to Activity sharing:

  • Data about your workouts, like the type and duration of the workout
  • Your Move, Exercise, and Stand rings for the day
  • Your personal goals for each Activity ring
  • Earned achievements
  • Minutes exercised
  • Hours stood
  • Steps taken
  • Distance traveled
  • Calories burned
  • Your timezone

If you’re wondering why your timezone information is shared, too, that’s because the system needs this information to let friends know when you started your day.

Activity sharing and privacy

Aside from the aforementioned data, the email address associated with your iCloud account will be visible to anyone you invite or accept an invite from. If you’ve been keeping email addresses on file with iCloud secret, and you want to keep it that way, simply refrain from using Activity sharing.

When you use this feature, your encrypted Activity data gets sent to Apple so it can securely share it with others. Apple will retain everyone’s Activity data for a short period of time, so that’s another thing to consider.

Your heartbeat and other Health data are never shared with friends in Activity sharing.

What happens when you share Activity rings with others?

  • Friends with whom you’re sharing can see your Activity rings and vice versa.
  • You see alerts when friends meet goals, finish workouts, and earn achievements.

It’s worth mentioning that adding a friend to Activity sharing will let you see all their Activity data from that day forward, and vice versa, rather than give you full access to their complete Activity history.

Add friends, family, and health coach to share your Activity rings

After you become friends with a person, you can both see each other’s Activity rings. Note that you can add up to 40 friends for Activity Sharing and not more than that.

Using your iPhone

  1. Open the Fitness app on your iPhone.
  2. Tap the Sharing tab, then tap Get Started if you see it.
  3. Tap the two-person icon from the top right and select Invite a Friend.
  4. Select a person under the Suggestions heading or enter their name and select it from your contacts, and tap Send to finish inviting people to Activity sharing.
Add friends to Share Activity from iPhone

Using your Apple Watch

  1. Open the Activity app on your Apple Watch.
  2. Tap the two-person icon from the bottom right.
  3. Tap Invite a Friend.
  4. Select the person from your contacts to send them the invitation.
Invite friends to Share Activity from Apple Watch

Ask your friend to accept your invitation

After you send the invitation, that person will receive a notification on their Apple device. They should tap this notification and accept your invitation for Activity sharing. Here’s what they should do on their iPhone:

  1. Tap the Set Up Activity Sharing notification, which will open the Fitness app. Tap Get Started if that splash screen pops up.
  2. Tap the two-person icon with a number at the top right.
  3. Lastly, hit the Accept option next to the person’s name under the Awaiting Your Reply section.
Accept friend request for activity sharing in iPhone Fitness app

View your friend’s shared Activity rings

Once you become friends with a person inside the Fitness or Activity apps, you both can see each other’s Activity rings. Here’s how to do that.

Using your iPhone

  1. Open the Fitness app and tap Sharing.
  2. Use the Highlights section at the top or tap the person’s name from the Sharing screen to see their Activity Rings for the day. You will also see their activity for the last 7 days.
See a friend's activity rings on your iPhone

Using your Apple Watch

  1. Open the Activity app on your Apple Watch.
  2. Tap the two-person icon from the bottom right.
  3. Select the person under the Name section to see their Move, Exercise, Stand, Total Steps, and Total Distance Activity progress.
See a friend's activity rings on your Apple Watch

Friend’s achievements

In addition to manually seeing your friend’s activity, the app will also send you notifications about their progress every time they meet all three of their Activity goals, finish workouts, or earn achievements.

friend's workout notification on Apple Watch

Message your friends

To encourage a friend to meet their goals, send them a motivational message.

When you get a notification about your friend’s activity, you can reply with preset replies for encouragement.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to create Activity groups as of yet.

Compete with your friends

You can engage in friendly competitions to keep each other motivated. We have a separate tutorial that walks you through the process of using Apple Watch activity competitions.

Sort your friend’s list

You can also sort your friends based on the desired parameter. To do that, open the iPhone Fitness app and tap Sharing. Next, tap Name next to Activity Rings and choose an option. On the Apple Watch, tap the two arrow icon next to the Name heading and pick an option:

  • Name: Sort your friends by alphabetical name.
  • Move: Sort your friends by their Move goal.
  • Exercise: Sort your friends by their Exercise goal.
  • Steps: Sort your friends by their Steps goal.
  • Workouts: Sort your friends by the number of workouts.
Sort your friend list in iPhone Fitness app

Manage your friend settings

Follow these steps to mute notifications from a friend, hide your activity from them, or remove them as your friend.

Note:

  • Muting Activity reminders will also silence other Activity alerts for the day, including your own progress updates, stand reminders, goal completions, and achievements.
  • After you hide your activity from a person, they will no longer see your name in the Sharing section of their iPhone’s Fitness app. But you can continue to see their Acitvity Rings as long as they also do not stop sharing their activity with you.
  • When you remove a friend from Activity sharing, they can’t see your activity, and you cannot see theirs.

Using your iPhone

  1. Go inside the Fitness app, tap Sharing, and select a friend.
  2. Tap the three dots menu icon from the top right and choose Mute Notification, Hide my Acitvity, or Remove Friend.
Manage your friend settings in iPhone Fitness app

Remember that you can also follow these steps to revert this change. For instance, later down the road, you may want to unmute notification from this friend to get notified of their activity once again or start sharing your activity with them.

However, if you remove a friend, you will have to follow the initial steps again to add them.

Using your Apple Watch

  1. Go inside the Activity app and tap the two-person icon.
  2. Tap a friend’s name.
  3. Scroll to the bottom and use Mute Notifications, Hide my Activity, or Remove Friend.
Manage your friend settings in Apple Watch Activity app

No daily updates about your friends’ activity?

If you can’t see your friend’s Activities, you both should check the following:

On the same note: How to close your Activity rings by adding data manually