Apple Watch shortened activity recordings

There are a few reasons why your first split, overall elapsed, and/or moving times may be shortened.

• • There’s a known Apple bug where if you start a recording while the Watch is still connected to your phone, the route on the map appears to start later, and the total distance is shorter compared to the Watch's unsaved activity summary. What happens is that a few points get recorded into the file that is pulled from the Phone’s GPS instead of the Watch. When the Watch goes outside, and the phone stays at home, it takes the Watch a long time to realize that it is disconnected and that it needs to start getting its own location. To avoid this in the future, start your recording away from your phone if you’re going to leave it behind.
  • If that's not the case, keep in mind that time data is only written to the file after a GPS connection has been established. Strava gets access to the GPS hardware once you’ve started a recording, so there can be a delay between the start of the activity and when a signal has been acquired. The discrepancy will not appear during the recording, the app will appear to be functioning normally. The issue is only visible once it has been uploaded to Strava. A workaround for the issue is to start an activity outside and wait for about 30 seconds before saving and discarding it - then start a new recording.