Mercy ... help please, with the plethroa of apps!
 

I'm trying to sort out which way to go on cycling apps with the goal of getting my data into Apple Health.

Growing up we lived near a bakery that would run 10,000 loaves of Sunbeam, then change the wrappers and run 10,000 loaves of Merita, then change the wrappers and run x-thousand loaves of ... you get the idea.

So when parsing the app choices, am I looking at the same bread with different wrappers, or is there a difference of substance between the choices on the shelf?

My legacy nutrition app is Lose It! I've been using that one since it first hit the market. If possible, I would like to stay with it and get the integration I want.

So which cycling app or combination of apps can any of you suggest?

Cyclemeter
MapMyRide
Road Bike
Strava

I would appreciate reading about:

Pros and cons
Online integration
Privacy issues (if any)

And syncing with other apps to get the data stream into the Apple Health app.

Finally, I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find the exact question so I posted the question. If this needs to go someplace else, hopefully a mod will spot it.

Thanks in advance,

Rick

I only use Strava. Never ever heard of the 1st and 3rd ones before, and have never needed to use mapmyride. A lot of people I know who plan routes only use ridewithgps.

I just use Strava to find routes, find segments, and upload rides.

I plan routes with RWGPS.

I log with Strava.

I don't use Apple Health.

I have a Garmin on my wrist. Syncs to the cloud when I'm done.

I mostly used Wahoo Fitness until recently, then uploaded that to Strava. For a couple of years Wahoo Fitness was more reliable, less resource intensive and ran almost flawlessly on my old iPhone 4s.

But the recent update was a downgrade in reliability. And it won't work reliably with my new Wahoo Tickr, either on my iPhone or newer Android phone. I can either get reliable heart rate monitoring, or speedometer, or GPS tracking, but not all three.

So I'm back to logging directly to Strava until Wahoo sorts out the glitches.

I used Cyclemeter for a year, I think around 2017, on the iPhone 4s. Good app, lots of customizable features. I let the subscription lapse after a year and could no longer access my own old data. That annoyed me so I didn't renew. The only data I could access were the logs I uploaded to Strava. And the trial version of Cyclemeter no longer offers access to some of the most useful features. But the annual subscription is reasonably priced and I'm tempted to try it again for the customizable training features and handy voice prompts.

Thanks to all for the feedback.

I've continued fiddling with it over the weekend and have found several combinations, along with a different app that seems to give me what I want.

MyMyFitness is a general fitness app that will track cycling workouts and sync info directly to my nutrition app.

So I'm going to end up with some combination that looks like this.

Cycling miles (using MapMyFitness) ==> to Lose It! ==> to Apple Health

While fiddling with it I discovered that Strava will do the same combination.

There are some other options I've figured out. For example, Apple Health will take data directly from numerous apps, including several that I mentioned above, and integrate them in the Apple Health dashboard, but those abut that forces me to use Apple Health each day.

My primary goal is to daily integrate the cycling app with Lose It! but to check Apple Health only occasionally - not the other way around.

Another factor is the online access to my history. All of the MapMy apps offer an excellent online dashboard, but MapMyFitness is the only one of the three that integrates with Lose It!

Strava also has a decent online dashboard and a slate of related apps that is almost overwhelming, but I only need a basic feed.

So I'm thinking I'll land at MapMyFitness for workouts (including cycling), and go with that.

Thanks again to all!