Hello Apple Developer Relations and the HealthKit team,
I'm a hobbyist developer and recreational swimmer building a personal app to make better use of my own Apple Watch workout data. My goal is training management, post-workout reviews, and long-term summaries of my swimming history.
Design goal
I would like to create a global map of places where I have swum, similar to the map view in Apple Photos:
- When zoomed out, group locations by country or region and show the number of distinct swimming places, rather than the number of workouts.
- When zoomed in, reveal individual places and their associated workouts. Venue or water-body names could be added later where they can be reliably identified.
- For pool swimming, a single location point is sufficient. A route is not required.
- For open-water swimming, show the place first, then reveal an individual workout's route when selected.
- Group repeated visits to the same place while retaining each workout for review.
Data requirement
The key requirement is read-only access to a location associated with an existing workout, including historical pool workouts recorded using Apple's Workout app. A coordinate linked to the workout would be enough to begin with; I am not expecting HealthKit to identify or name the venue.
What I have observed
In on-device tests, I can read routes for open-water swimming workouts. For the historical pool workouts I checked, no route was returned, and I did not find usable location coordinates in the public workout, activity, event, or route metadata I inspected. However, Apple Fitness displays a map point for historical pool workouts. The absence of a route therefore does not establish the absence of a recorded location.
I have read the DTS response explaining that there is currently no public API for third-party access to indoor workout locations: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/827939
Current obstacle
Without a supported way to obtain these historical points, the app cannot automatically build a useful map of past pool visits. Recording locations from now on or asking users to assign old workouts manually would not recover the existing history. A computer-backup extraction workflow also would not meet the intended standalone iPhone app experience.
Questions and enhancement request
- Beyond the current HealthKit APIs, is there any supported, user-initiated export or import path that preserves historical indoor workout coordinates and their association with the workout?
- If there is no supported path today, could Apple consider read-only access to historical workout locations through HealthKit, with explicit user authorization and clear handling of missing or approximate locations?
I understand that a formal enhancement request belongs in Feedback Assistant. I am sharing this concrete design and data requirement here to clarify the use case and ask whether a supported alternative already exists.
Thank you for considering this request.