Feature Request: Sick Mode for Apple Fitness

As previously mentioned I got pretty sick in October. I’m also a daily Apple Watch wearer, which means there were two solid weeks there where I didn’t close my rings.

As such, I have a feature request: you should be able to tell Apple Fitness you’re sick.

To be clear, this isn’t because I want a way to cheat my streak back into existence. I mean, I had a pretty good streak going, and it’s irritating to reset that count, but that’s not the point.

While I was sick, it was deeply irritating to get those passive agressive “motivating” messages in the morning about “You closed one ring yesterday, bet you can get them all today, go get ‘em!” No man, leave me alone, I’m dying here. There’s a way to delve into the settings and turn off the “coach notifications”, but I was not up to that. I needed one button I could mash; I’m sick, I’ll let you know when I’m better.

Then, once I got better, all my stats and graphs and whatnot have these huge gaps in them. I don’t want to skip those or leave those out, but I would love to have a way to annotate those with a note: “this is when you had covid, ignore this”. Maybe a different color? Yellow for sick, instead of the usual red, green, blue.

But what really frustrates me is whats going on now. Apple Fitness does this genuinely cool and useful thing where it’ll compute long-term trends and averages, and tell you about it when they change significantly. And so for the last week I keep getting updates about “you have a new trend!” and then it shows me how many more steps I’ve taken this week versus the average over October.

And no shit, Apple Fitness! I basically didn’t stand up for ten days there, I sure hope I’m taking more steps now. What would be valuable is to know what my current scores are versus before I got sick. Am I back to where I was? I should be back to where I was in september, am I?

And there’s no way to ask that question. There’s no way to tell it what it needs to know to figure that out itself.

We’re living in the Plague Years, Apple. Let us tell the computers about it.