My iPhone is currently in for repair for a few days. I’ve been using an old iPhone 8 I have lying around in the meantime, but the ultra isn’t able to pair as the phone can’t have ios17. As my main phone is having a whole new rear system and I can’t pair it with my spare I was full expecting to loose my activity data for the period while my phone is in for repair.
To my surprise, after a few days, my activity data has suddenly updated after charging the watch this morning. Checking health on my iPad and everything has synced - activity rings, workouts - everything is there except sleep. Activities have even ended up on strava (presumably via the iPhone 8 unless some sort of witchcraft has gone down)
It’s gone against everything I had read beforehand, where I honestly believed that I would most likely loose all my data and have to repair with the phone once I got it back. I’m posting this mostly to figure out how this has happened - if its a new feature in watch os10 or something - but also so those in a similar situation with a phone in for repair know this is possible because everything I had read suggested not!
My understanding was that this was done via the phone and that the watch isn’t able to do it itself. That certain seemed to be the case for the first few days; no data into fitness from the watch.
Based on previous posts on here that’s what I expected so I was pleasantly surprised when that didn’t happen!
Speaking to the guys at the Apple Store when I picked my phone up they said its an undocumented change that they believe came in around the time they added family set up as an option. If the watch isn’t synced with a phone for a set period it will begin to sync itself when on charge.