u/the5krunner

Huawei announced Apple Watch support for HarmonyOS 7 in September, and the watch app is now on China's App Store. It's published by ThunderSoft rather than Huawei, and it works with the Mate 90, Pura X View and Mate XT 2 on HarmonyOS 7.0.0.109 or later, with watchOS 10 on the watch.

You install it on the watch, it shows a QR code, and you scan that with the Huawei phone. After that the watch shows the phone's calls, texts and notification summaries, and either device can make the other ring so you can find it. You can't answer calls from the watch.

That's the whole feature list. Nothing about workouts, heart rate or sleep goes to the Huawei phone, and the watch still needs an iPhone for setup and Apple Health. Early App Store reviews average 1.5 out of 5, mostly over dropped connections.

What I find interesting is the direction. Garmin has spent years asking Apple for iPhone features. Huawei has gone the other way and built its own bridge into Apple's watch, and vivo has a similar app that also sends workout data across.

Read the full Apple Watch on Huawei article on the5krunner →

The article explains how the watch app and phone link together, what Huawei hasn't disclosed, and how this compares with Garmin's iPhone problem.

Is a notifications-only bridge actually worth anything to someone who trains with an Apple Watch?

The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 works only with Android and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 only with an iPhone, so for most people there is no choice to make.

For the rare reader buying both together, Apple has satellite safety and longer GPS modes, and Samsung is £100 cheaper with built-in route guidance. But Gemini beats siri any day. The Apple ecosystem is impressively integated once you get into it

Samsung also ties its ECG and sleep apnoea detection to Samsung phones.

Full comparison: https://the5krunner.com/2026/10/02/galaxy-watch-ultra-2-vs-apple-watch-ultra-4/

Would satellite safety be enough to make you switch phone?

Both have the same health and training features, and both have a sapphire crystal display.

Samsung claims 60 hours of battery for the Ultra 2 and 30 for the Watch 9, and only the Ultra 2 has fast charging, diving, a power meter and a trail run mode. The Watch 9 weighs half as much.

I would pick the Ultra 2 if your wrist is big enough.

Full comparison: https://the5krunner.com/2026/10/02/galaxy-watch-9-vs-galaxy-watch-ultra-2/

Is battery life alone enough to justify the extra £300?

Samsung claims the same battery life for both watches, and this year's health features are coming to the original by update. So what you are buying with the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is a cycling power meter, a trail run mode and diving to 40m.

I think most owners should keep theirs.

Full comparison: https://the5krunner.com/2026/10/02/galaxy-watch-ultra-2-vs-galaxy-watch-ultra/

Does anyone here use any of those three enough to pay £649 for them?

• Apple's watches charge about twice as fast as Samsung's.
• Apple Watch Series 12 reaches 80 per cent in half an hour and Ultra 4 in 45 minutes, against 40 per cent in half an hour for the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, which also needs a 10-watt plug that is not in the box.
• But the Ultra 2 is claimed at 60 hours per charge and the Series 12 at 24, so ten minutes on the charger buys about eight hours of use on either.
• The Apple Watch Ultra 4 does best at about 12 hours, and the Galaxy Watch 9 worst at under four, because it has no fast charging at all.

These are all manufacturer claims, not tests. Does charging speed still matter once a watch lasts two days?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/10/02/galaxy-watch-vs-apple-watch-charging-speed/

The Galaxy Watch 9 has a bigger battery than the Galaxy Watch 8 in both sizes, 20 per cent bigger in the 40mm, and Samsung claims the same 30 hours of battery life for both watches. It has swapped its own Exynos chip for a Qualcomm one, moved to Bluetooth 6 and changed the strap, and the case measurements are identical to a tenth of a millimetre.

The new health features, Daily Cardio Load, Vitals, Fitness Index and Heart Health Score, are software, and Samsung opened the Watch 8 beta for that software in late August. So a Watch 8 owner gains nothing by upgrading, and a new buyer is choosing between a 40mm with a usefully bigger battery and a discounted 44mm where the battery barely changed.

A bigger battery with the same claimed life usually means the chip is using the difference. Is the Qualcomm chip actually an improvement, or just a change of supplier?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/10/02/galaxy-watch-9-vs-galaxy-watch-8/

Samsung has quietly drawn a line through its own watch range. The Galaxy Watch 4 came off the security update list in September, so it will never get Daily Cardio Load, Vitals or Running Coach, and the Watch 5 is due its last big update. Above that line, almost everything new is software.

The Watch 8 has the same case, screen, GPS and claimed 30 hours as the Watch 9, and Samsung is already testing the new software on it. The Watch 6 and 7 are the awkward middle: they keep getting updates, but Samsung limits Running Coach to the Watch 7 and later, and the two-signal GPS cannot be added to a Watch 6 by update.

So the honest guide says upgrade from a 4 or 5, keep an 8, and only move from a 6 or 7 for a reason you can name.

Given that Samsung charges nothing for the new health features, is there any reason left to buy a Watch 9 over a discounted Watch 8?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/specs/samsung/galaxy-watch-upgrade-guide-watch-4-5-6-7-or-8/

KeepEatClean is an iPhone app that pairs logged meals with Apple Health or WHOOP data to look for personal associations between eating and recovery or sleep. The notable part is the threshold it enforces before it will say anything: at least 12 usable paired food-and-health days, and even past that minimum it runs further evidence checks before calling something a supported pattern. Reaching 12 days does not guarantee a finding, and the developer is explicit that any association it does surface describes a relationship in someone's own records, not a cause. Is a 12-day minimum actually enough to separate a real personal pattern from noise?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/29/meal-pattern-wearable-data/

Runna says its training plans are not created by AI. In a statement the company said experienced coaches design the plans and an algorithm then tailors and adapts them to each runner. That sits awkwardly with the app's own Runna AI feature, and with earlier reporting that described machine learning and generative AI.

The adaptive part is also narrower than many runners assume. Runna may change your pace targets if you repeatedly miss or beat them in tempo and interval sessions, and it ignores reps that look wrong. Everything else hangs off one estimated race time, which you can raise or lower yourself. Runna does not train you to a goal time, so to train for a faster time you raise the estimate.

Is a coach-written plan with pace adjustments really an AI coach? A: Probably not

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/28/is-runna-ai/

Apple is reportedly building a screenless fitness band to compete with Whoop, and the interesting detail isn't the hardware. It's that Eddy Cue, Apple's services chief, is the executive driving it, which points toward a subscription strategy rather than a one-off hardware sale.

• The likely design keeps core tracking free but gates the Readiness score, Health Age and deeper Vitals analysis behind either a current Apple Watch pairing or a Health+ subscription.
• Apple Pay, Express Transit, Car Key and Home Key would also stay off the band entirely, even though the technology already exists in the Watch.

The whole approach reads as deliberate: build something people want alongside a Watch, not instead of one.

Does gating the Readiness score to Watch owners actually hold up as a strategy, or does it just push serious buyers toward Garmin or Whoop instead?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/28/apple-whoop-competitor-band/

Compound takes a different approach to strength apps: instead of a library of programs to choose between, there's exactly one four-day routine (Pull, Push, Legs, Auxiliary), and the app decides the weight, the reps and when to add load.

The progression logic is double progression: reps climb first within a set range, then weight goes up once every set in a session hits the top of that range, at the same weight. A worked example from the developer's own bench press log shows why the weakest set matters more than the best one: on one Push day all four sets hit the target of 8 reps, so the next session moved to 170 lb. On the next 170 lb session the last set stalled at 4 reps out of a target of 5, so the weight held rather than advancing, even though three of the four sets were fine.

It runs from the wrist on Apple Watch (iPhone has to stay nearby), saves to Apple Health, and the App Store privacy label reads "Data Not Collected."

Does cutting out program choice entirely actually solve the adherence problem, or does removing customisation just create a different reason to quit once the one routine stops fitting someone's schedule or goals?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/28/compound-strength-app-apple-watch/

Heart Analyzer ran a direct comparison wearing an Apple Watch Ultra 4 alongside an Ultra 2, using its own read of what each watch actually writes to Apple Health rather than Apple's own summaries. By day, Ultra 4 saves a heart rate reading roughly every 30 seconds against every four to five minutes on Ultra 2. Overnight that gap disappears entirely: across three nights, Ultra 4 logged 108, 149 and 127 heart rate readings between 23:00 and 06:00, and Ultra 2 logged more, at 159, 181 and 145.

HRV goes the other way. Asleep, Ultra 4 takes around 100 five-minute readings a night, covering about 92% of it. An older watch without AFib History switched on gets three or four one-minute checks a night, which swung between 53 and 259 ms in the test and made the nightly average come down to luck. Turning AFib History on took the same Ultra 2 to around 30 checks a night, close enough to land within 3 ms of Ultra 4's average on every shared night.

If the overnight HRV jump after upgrading is mostly a measurement-frequency artefact rather than a real physiological shift, how much should anyone actually trust a new baseline in the first few weeks on a new watch?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/28/heart-analyzer-apple-watch-heart-rate-hrv-apple-health/

I've been running the FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus, the small-format Abbott CGM sensor, alongside a Garmin Fenix 9 Pro and an Apple Watch Ultra 4, reading it through the free Sugar Sense Connect IQ app.

The sensor itself only talks to your phone, so it caches readings until your phone is back in Bluetooth range, and the watch also needs to be linked to that same phone to show anything live.

The NFC tap-to-scan shortcut on the sensor was unreliable in practice. In one basic test, a carbohydrate gel took just over 20 minutes to show up as a rise in the app at rest. Each sensor runs to roughly £70 in the UK and lasts about two weeks, so keeping one on constantly gets expensive.

Is a two-week glucose sensor worth the cost for an athlete who isn't diabetic?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/21/libre-3-plus-review/

Several regulatory and trademark filings list two new Coros watches that haven't been announced: a Vertix 4 and a completely unfamiliar name, Orizon. The filings also confirms the Pace 4 Pro's release date of 22 September, alongside models already on sale like the Pace 3, Pace 4, Apex 4 and Nomad.

The Vertix numbering skips 3 entirely, jumping straight from the Vertix 2/2S generation to Vertix 4, which lines it up with Pace 4 and Apex 4 rather than following its own sequence.

Orizon has no precedent in any prior Coros leak. Coros previously used the Nomad name for a rugged, fishing-focused watch, so a sport-specific angle for Orizon, perhaps sailing or an aerial sport, looks plausible but is entirely unconfirmed and could even be a Whoop-like band.

Is Coros stretching itself too thin by launching yet another distinct but niche product line rather than consolidating around fewer names?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/21/coros-vertix-4-orizon/

Cortisol+ is a new Apple Health app that turns HRV, sleep, resting heart rate and seven other inputs into a single 0-100 wellness score, using base weights of HRV 20%, sleep 20% and resting heart rate 18%, with the remainder split across respiratory rate, activity, blood oxygen, VO2 max, walking heart rate, heart rate recovery and workout recovery.

Despite the name, Cortisol+ does not measure cortisol, and the developer is explicit that the score has never been validated against a laboratory cortisol test.

Is a named cortisol score responsible given the app itself admits it doesn't measure cortisol, or does the label do more work than the disclaimer can undo?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/21/cortisolplus-apple-health-stress-hrv

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple has cut a handful of jobs on the Fitness+ audio team, the people behind Time to Walk and Time to Run. New audio episodes will come out less often, though they aren't being cancelled outright. It's the first reduction in staff there, separate from August's Siri and Vision Pro cuts.

Gurman doesn't think Apple is shutting Fitness+ down. He bets it eventually gets folded into the Health app, more likely in 2027 than sooner, possibly as a combined subscription some are calling Health+. Apple's September 9 event added Readiness scores and AI insights to Health but stopped well short of merging Fitness+ in.

AppleInsider pushed back, pointing out Apple has 73 Cupertino roles open that mention fitness. That figure covers fitness broadly though, not confirmed as Fitness+ specifically, so it doesn't directly answer the cuts on that team.

Is merging Fitness+ into Health+ actually the smarter move for Apple? A: I think so

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/20/apple-fitness-plus-job-cuts/

watchOS 27 adds one new watch face, Siri Modular.

Rather than just adding another face to the pile, instead of the usual four-corner complication grid, it uses three horizontal zones across the top, middle and bottom of the screen, and the middle or top zone can switch to an analogue time display instead of showing complications.

Apple Watch Ultra models get an exclusive bezel ring that can show seconds, Training Readiness, Elevation or Depth, and no mode on any model displays running seconds in the clock itself. The face works on Apple Watch Series 9 and later, Apple Watch SE 3, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later, including the brand new Apple Watch Ultra 4.

Impressed?

Full guide with all 72 faces: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/20/watchos-27-apple-watch-faces-giude/