Does Shed work without an Apple Watch?

Yes. Anything that writes workouts to Apple Health works, including Garmin, COROS, Polar, Suunto and phone-based run tracking. An Apple Watch gives the richest data and is the only device Shed can send sessions to.

No. Shed is iPhone only, and the Health dependency is the reason. There is no equivalent single ingestion path on Android that carries the same data quality.

What if I revoke a permission?

Shed carries on with what it has. Losing sleep or HRV means the readiness layer gets quieter; losing workouts means it cannot see your training, which is most of the product.

Connect

Shed and Apple Health

Shed has one way in, and this is it. Everything you wear or run with reaches Shed because it writes to Apple Health on your iPhone, which means the list of things that work with Shed is essentially the list of things that write to Health.

What Shed reads, and what it does with it

Workouts. Distance, duration, pace, splits, route and the heart rate series. This is how Shed knows what you actually ran rather than what was prescribed, which is what execution scoring and pace re-anchoring are built on.
Resting heart rate. A multi-day rise is one of the earliest signals of accumulated fatigue or an illness starting. It feeds the morning readiness call.
Heart rate variability. Noisy day to day and meaningful as a trend. Shed reads the direction over several days rather than reacting to any single morning.
Sleep. Duration and stages where your device records them. Three short nights in a row changes what tomorrow should be.
VO2max estimate. Apple’s own estimate, used as one input among several rather than as a verdict. Shed also computes its own fitness estimate from your runs.
Body weight. Optional. Used for fuelling and sweat-rate guidance if you record it.

Setting it up

1
Sync the vendor app to Apple Health
Open the vendor’s own iPhone app, find its Apple Health or Health Sync setting, and turn on writing to Health. Most apps ask for this at install and plenty of people tap past it.
2
Grant Shed read access
Shed asks for Health permissions on first launch. Workouts, heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep and VO2max are the ones that matter. You can change them later in the iPhone Health app under Sharing.
3
Let the backfill run
Shed reads your history on first connect, not just new runs, so your paces are grounded in what you have actually been doing rather than in one race you typed in.

Why one path instead of twenty

Plenty of apps connect directly to a dozen vendor APIs. That gets you breadth, and it gets you a reconciliation problem: the same run arriving three times from three sources with different timestamps, different distances and different rounding.

Health already solves that on the device. It is also the path that does not require you to hand a third party your Garmin or Strava credentials. The cost is real and worth stating: anything that does not write to Health does not reach Shed, and Shed cannot send anything back out.

Frequently asked

Does Shed work without an Apple Watch?: Yes. Anything that writes workouts to Apple Health works, including Garmin, COROS, Polar, Suunto and phone-based run tracking. An Apple Watch gives the richest data and is the only device Shed can send sessions to.
Is Shed on Android?: No. Shed is iPhone only, and the Health dependency is the reason. There is no equivalent single ingestion path on Android that carries the same data quality.
What if I revoke a permission?: Shed carries on with what it has. Losing sleep or HRV means the readiness layer gets quieter; losing workouts means it cannot see your training, which is most of the product.
Does Shed write anything back to Apple Health?: No. It reads only.

Two taps to connect

If it writes to Apple Health, Shed reads it.

Grant Health access once and your runs arrive on their own, from whatever you already wear. Shed grounds your paces in what you actually ran, not one race result, and writes the block around it.

Get your plan on iPhone