How to Do an Apple Watch Competition With Multiple Friends

September 27, 2026 · 8 min read

Apple’s Activity competitions are one of the best things about the Apple Watch. A week-long race, a notification every time your friend pulls ahead, a trophy at the end. The problem comes when you try to invite your whole friend group, family or office team. There’s no “add another person” button, and there never has been. The top-voted answer on Apple’s own forum puts it simply: “you can challenge only one friend at a time to a competition.”

This guide covers exactly how Apple’s scoring works (it matters for fairness), the workaround most groups try first, and how to set up a single group leaderboard that still uses your Apple Watch data.

How Apple Watch competitions work

Here are the rules as Apple documents them. You can check them in Apple’s Activity sharing guide.

How to start one

1. Open the Activity app on your Apple Watch.
2. Tap the sharing button and choose a friend you already share Activity with.
3. Scroll down and tap Invite [name].
4. Wait for them to accept. The seven days start once they do.

Why the points system is less fair than it looks

Because points are a percentage of your own goals, two people can do very different amounts of work and score the same. If your Move goal is 800 active calories and your friend’s is 300, closing your ring and closing theirs are both worth 100 points, even though you burned more than twice as much.

That’s deliberate. It lets people at different fitness levels compete. But it has two side effects that come up again and again in group chats:

• Goal setting becomes strategy. Whoever has the easiest goals has the easiest week. Ring goals are set by each person, so a lower Move goal is the fastest route to a higher score.
• The cap flattens big days. Once you hit 600 points in a day, nothing more counts. A long weekend ride scores the same as an average day where you comfortably closed everything.

Neither is a problem between two friends who trust each other. Across a group of eight with very different routines, it’s the main reason competitions stop feeling fair.

Workaround 1: the round robin (everyone challenges everyone)

You can run separate one-on-one competitions with several friends at the same time. So the closest you can get to a group competition inside Apple’s system is for every person to challenge every other person. The number of competitions grows quickly:

It works for three or four people. Beyond that, the problems pile up:

• There’s no single leaderboard. You see your own head-to-heads, not who’s actually winning the group.
• Start dates drift. Each competition starts when its invite is accepted, so half the group finishes on Tuesday and half on Thursday.
• It stops after seven days. Every competition has to be started again by hand, and after two or three weeks someone always forgets.

Workaround 2: screenshots in the group chat

The other common fix is a WhatsApp group where everyone posts their rings or step count each evening and one person keeps a spreadsheet. It works for about four days. After that, the scorekeeper gets busy, screenshots arrive late, somebody’s number gets disputed, and the challenge quietly dies. We wrote about that pattern in detail in why most group fitness challenges fail by day 3. The short version: if scoring depends on people reporting their own numbers, it eventually stops.

Workaround 3: one leaderboard that reads Apple Health

Your Apple Watch writes its steps, walking and running distance, active calories and workouts into Apple Health on your iPhone. Any app that can read Apple Health can put everyone’s numbers on one shared leaderboard automatically, with nothing to report and no screenshots.

When you compare options, check four things:

1. It reads Apple Health automatically. Nobody should have to log anything by hand.
2. It scores an absolute metric. Steps, distance or active minutes are the same for everyone, so nobody can win by setting easier goals.
3. You set the dates. A weekend, a week, a month, with one start line for the whole group.
4. It includes friends without a watch. An iPhone counts steps on its own, so step and distance challenges can include them.

A little competition is worth setting up properly. In the STEP UP trial (602 adults, 24 weeks), the group that competed on step goals averaged about 920 more steps a day than the control group. It was also the only group that stayed ahead after the game was switched off.

Which metric to use for a mixed group

If you’re unsure, pick steps for a week. It’s the fairest option for most groups, and it works for anyone with a phone.

Setting up a group challenge in Sweats

Sweats was built for exactly this kind of challenge. Here’s the setup:

1. Connect Apple Health when you first open the app. Your Apple Watch steps, distance, active calories and workouts come in automatically.
2. Create a challenge and pick the metric (steps, distance, workout minutes or calories), the goal and the dates.
3. Invite your group. Everyone who joins sees the same live leaderboard, filled in from their own recorded activity.
4. Let it run. Nobody posts screenshots, and nobody has to trust anyone else’s maths.

Joining challenges is free, as many as you like, and the free plan lets you run one active challenge of your own. For the one-on-one rivalry Apple does well, Sweats has duels. Tap Beat this on a friend’s workout and it becomes a private race to their number. Duels don’t count against the challenge limit.

You don’t have to give up your rings. Keep your Apple competitions going with your closest rival and use a group challenge for everyone else.

A simple 7-day group challenge rule sheet

• Metric: total steps, Monday to Sunday.
• Who: anyone with an iPhone. A watch is optional.
• Scoring: automatic from Apple Health. Manual entries don’t count.
• Prize: last place books the Sunday brunch spot, first place picks next week’s metric.
• Rematch: a new round starts every Monday, so one bad week never matters.

Want more formats than steps? Our list of 25 fitness challenge ideas for friends has rules for each one.