News

Important ! – Oura Ring Integrates with Apple Watch – Garmin to follow?

6 Comments

Oura Ring Gets Apple Watch Support

Surprisingly, no major wearable I know of integrates with Apple Watch. Oura has just changed that with a very nice WatchOS app plus those all-important complications.

First Impressions

I’m impressed. It’s a straightforward yet information-rich Watch app. It’s pretty too! The app doesn’t do anything special other than grab bits of information from the iOS app, I guess one way of looking at it is that you have easily glanceable information that saves you from having to take your iPhone out of your bag.

A few taps on the Watch app take you to the line charts you will already be familiar with in the iOS app. Meaning that, for example, all the various contributors to overall sleep quality like Sleep Latency, Sleep Timing and Sleep Tracking Hours are all scored out of 100% and added to that there are also richer charts over time covering your sleep stages, heart rate and more.

There are also 7 complications where you can add your readiness score, sleep score and show the Ring’s battery level.

Criticisms

It’s hard to criticise (yes I did just say that!)

The easiest criticism is that many of the data points overlap those that the Apple Watch natively generates. Obviously, Oura 100% knew that. They are simply giving more options to more people, which is a good thing

Perhaps the complications don’t make the best use of the available space. You can see from some of my images here that the Oura data might perhaps be best shown off with a coloured circle around the number, where a complete circle represents 100%.

Complications on Watch Face

Limitations

It seems to work on all Watches that support the latest version of watchOS and it works on the current and previous-gen rings…and it’s free.

 

What I want

The only thing that is missing for me is a complication of the nightly average HRV. Maybe also a nighly chart over time of HRV.

That information is just part of my morning routine where I correlate Oura HRV data with other sources…I’m guessing there are about 20 people globally who do this so Oura can be completely forgiven for totally ignoring my needs here 😉

I tend to only use the Oura Ring as a sleep tracker as it has a good degree of accuracy and an easy-to-wear format whilst asleep.

A chart complication that shows changing readiness throughout the day would definitely be used by many people…something similar to Garmin’s body battery. The problem here would be that there would be little scientific backing to the data shown and Oura tends to err towards science, unlike some other companies we could mention who invent their own baseless metrics.

Will Garmin and Others Follow?

In a nutshell: No. 😉

Why would Garmin or Fitbit or Polar or Suunto or anyone else for that matter encourage you to use the competing Apple Watch?

Oura Ring is a special case in the sense that it is a well-developed, data-rich ecosystem that partly complements the Apple Watch

 

 

Reader-Powered Content

This content is not sponsored. It’s mostly me behind the labour of love which is this site and I appreciate everyone who follows, subscribes or Buys Me A Coffee ❤️ Alternatively please buy the reviewed product from my partners. Thank you! FTC: Affiliate Disclosure: Links pay commission. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

6 thoughts on “Important ! – Oura Ring Integrates with Apple Watch – Garmin to follow?”

  1. I appreciate your coverage of fringe products like this.

    It seems so obvious to me that a ring is a better location for most of us to capture steps, sleep-tracking, & HRV (and therefore all the other metrics that piggy back off of those.

    Can you speculate why it is only Oura (and the 2 other smaller companies) that are willing to enter this market?

    I admit I am baffled that Garmin hasn’t introduced a ring version of their “vivosmart” line yet. For that matter, Apple too – however they are much more about ‘the screen’ in their products and a ring will simply not have a screen, or much of one.

    Should I just buy an Oura? If I were to do that I would need to exit the Garmin ecosystem and instead uses something that could maybe aggregate the Garmin measurements alongside Oura into one complete picture/dashboard. Any options there? Trainingpeaks? I use Sporttracks and I don’t think that will work.

    Reply

    1. those questions have plagued reviewers for years 😉

      this should help: https://the5krunner.com/2022/05/15/oura-sues-circular-ring/ as might this https://the5krunner.com/2021/12/11/garmin-smart-band-what-is-it/ and this https://the5krunner.com/2021/09/17/garmin-anti-predictions-what-wont-happen-in-2022/

      the finger is NOT a great place to track HR during activity but it is a pretty good place for a sleep tracker (I use it for that and don’t like watches at night, especially bulky Garmins)

      keep using garmin for sport data collection. from memory you can sync to oura via strava
      if you are thinking of training peaks then you shouldn’t think of oura as anything but a sleep tracker

      Oura sells tens of millions of dollars worth a rings a year….it’s a serious product…but its a wellness tracker not an athletic sports product.

      Reply

      1. So Oura can’t send HRV type stuff to Strava or Trainingpeaks?

        What about step counts? I use my Vivosmart as my backup step tracker (wear it when I’m on the treadmill and I lay my 945 on the console so I can see it) and as you do with your Oura, as my sleep tracker. I’m assuming Oura counts basic steps but I would want it to send that somewhere centralized that Garmin, Stryd, etc are also sending data for dashboard view.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

wp_footer()