If you wear a WHOOP and use an iPhone, you have probably noticed something odd: your band knows your night in detail, and your phone knows nothing about it. Open Apple Health the morning after a terrible sleep and it will show you a blank card, or the handful of steps your phone counted on the way to the kitchen.
That is not a bug in your setup. It is the shape of the two systems, and it is worth understanding before you go looking for a fix.
Why the two do not talk on their own
Apple Health is a database on your phone. Apps write into it, apps read out of it, and you decide in Settings who may do which. An Apple Watch writes to it constantly, which is why health apps on an iPhone behave as though they can see everything: they can, because the Watch put it there.
WHOOP is built the other way round. Your band syncs to the WHOOP app, and WHOOP's own app is where the data lives. It is not hostile, it is just a separate store. The consequence for you is concrete: every other app on your phone that wants to know how you slept is reading an empty room.
So the question "how do I get WHOOP data into Apple Health" really has two halves. What is technically available, and what should honestly be written.
What can move
WHOOP exposes your own measurements through its developer API, which you can authorise for an app you trust. When an app has that permission, the following have a real home in Apple Health:
- Sleep. Time in bed and time asleep, with light, deep and REM totals.
- Resting heart rate, recorded each morning.
- Heart rate variability, the overnight measure most people mean when they say "my HRV was low".
- Breathing rate and blood oxygen.
- Wrist temperature during sleep.
- Workouts, with duration, energy and distance.
Each of those maps onto a type Apple Health already defines, which matters more than it sounds. A sample written under the right type is readable by every other app you have given permission to, forever, whether or not the app that wrote it still exists.
What should not move, and why
WHOOP's most recognisable numbers are its composite scores: strain, recovery percentage, sleep performance. They are the reason many people wear the band.
None of them belong in Apple Health, and a well-behaved app will not put them there.
Apple Health has no field that means "recovery percentage". There is no type for strain. An app that wanted to show you those numbers in Health would have to file them under something they are not, and that misfiled sample then sits in your health record for years, read by other apps that believe the label rather than the intent. A number in the wrong drawer is worse than a number that is missing, because the missing one is honest.
There is a second, subtler case. WHOOP reports your sleep stage totals, not a minute-by-minute hypnogram. An app can write those totals into Health accurately, but the moment it decides where in the night each stage sat, it is estimating. That estimate can be reasonable and still be an estimate, and the only decent thing to do is to say so in the sample itself rather than let it read as measurement.
Where Pulse fits
We build Pulse, a couples wellness app for iPhone and Apple Watch, and this problem is one we had to solve for ourselves. Pulse reads Apple Health to work out whether your day looks different from your own recent weeks, and then sends your partner one short sentence about it. With a WHOOP and no Apple Watch, Pulse was blind.
So WHOOP support in Pulse does exactly what is described above and nothing more. You sign in to WHOOP once from Pulse's settings, your phone talks to WHOOP directly, and the measurements land in Apple Health on your device. The composite scores stay in the WHOOP app where they make sense. The sleep stage caveat is written into each sample.
One detail we care about more than most: your measurements never pass through our servers. The only thing that touches our side is the sign-in handshake itself, because WHOOP requires a client secret that an app on a phone cannot safely carry, and we keep nothing from it. The full route is written out on the WHOOP page.
If you wear both
Wearing a WHOOP and an Apple Watch at once is common, and it creates an obvious risk: two sources writing sleep for the same night, and a naive app adding them together to tell you that you slept fourteen hours.
The fix is not clever, it just has to be deliberate. An app reading Health should count each minute of sleep once, preferring one source per night rather than summing across them. If you use another app that does this badly, you will usually see it immediately, because the number will be absurd.
The part worth keeping
Whatever app you end up using, the principle is the same one that makes Apple Health useful in the first place: your measurements should sit in a store that you own, under labels that mean what they say, readable by whatever you choose to use next year.
Interpretations belong to the app that made them. Measurements belong to you.
About Pulse
Pulse is a couples wellness app for iPhone and Apple Watch. It turns your own body signals into one gentle daily cue for your partner, and never shows them a number.
