This Apple Watch quirk will annoy anyone who loves collecting badges

The main reason I use an Apple Watch is for my health. I want to keep track of as many health parameters as possible, from regular life to training sessions. The wearable not only gives me early warning signs, but also helps me reach my running goals.

But now I’ve found something that gets in the way of that. I’ve discovered an issue on my Apple Watch Series 10 that is so annoying that it supersedes all the other annoying Apple Watch Series 10 issues I’ve encountered since September.

Whether you run marathons or not, I’m sure this will bug you and you’ll want Apple to get to the bottom of it as soon as possible. The problem is that my Apple Watch Series 10 doesn’t give me the badges and awards I earned, and I’ve got the receipts to prove it. This is even worse than the Apple Watch Series 10 missing heartbeats, which happens all the time when I work out.

Apple made tracking health data incredibly simple from the moment it launched the first-gen model. The Apple Watch came with a health gamification system that we all loved. The mission is simple: Close your rings every day. It’s a life-and-death “save the cheerleader, save the world” type of thing.

But it’s not just about getting in your activity, exercising, and standing for at least one minute every hour. Apple also devised the badges and awards system, which gives you a shiny digital token every time you complete a milestone.

Those badges are so important that Apple keeps releasing new ones for special occasions, and I do my best to collect them all.

This brings me to my current problem, which I hope Apple will address soon. The Apple Watch Series 10 has cheated me out of a few medals, and I’ll show you how it happened. (It’s not a Series 10 issue, but a software quirk that’s affecting all Apple Watch models, as you’ll see below.)

The May 2025 challenge consists of doing nine running workouts that last at least five minutes each. I thought I’d be done with it by mid-May, but that was before several days of rain “motivated” me to choose rest or walks instead of runs.

With three days to go, I’ve completed five runs, but that’s wrong. I know for certain I finished seven runs this month, and I was aiming to reach that milestone and get the badge. Two of those runs were recorded with Runkeeper: One was a half-marathon race and the other a 10K run, as seen below.

However, the Workout app did not recognize those runs. I won’t get the running badge, which stings, considering I’m a runner. The Workout app only remembers a 10K run from a couple of weeks ago. Not cool, Apple Watch Series 10 — not cool!

It gets worse. My Fastest 10K badge says I got the award on October 5th, 2023, as seen below.

But guess what? I know for certain that my fastest 10K happened a year later. Again, I have the Runkeeper receipts to prove it.

I ran my fastest 10K on September 1st last year, several weeks before I got the Apple Watch Series 10. I recorded that run with Runkeeper, but never got a badge to acknowledge my personal best. I noticed the issue at the time, but let it slide. I figured I would just beat that 10K time again in the future. Challenge accepted, as I’ve often said.

But I remembered it now that I’m going to miss the May 2025 badge. It’s unacceptable for the Apple Watch not to give me the recognition I earned, the recognition that was promised. Yes, I kid, as this is a trivial issue compared to all the ways the Apple Watch Series 10 has failed me since I bought it, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

Why it really matters

However, we live in the age of AI, and I hope one day Apple Intelligence will help me with my health and fitness tracking needs.

Those badges aren’t just a fun marker for answering questions about what I’m doing with my life. “See, I’ve run 150 10K races so far; they don’t run themselves.” One day soon, I’ll be able to ask Apple Intelligence complex questions about my runs.

I want to see more detailed statistics, like what time of day I usually run my fastest 10Ks or how much I slept before hitting my personal best. I might also want a graph showing me the evolution of my personal best over time. 

Most of that data already exists in a database on the iPhone. The AI needs to retrieve it and then answer my questions. But if Apple Intelligence were to look at my badge data right now, it might miss a few runs that were tracked with Runkeeper or some other app in the past. It would certainly miss my PB for a 10K.

With all that in mind, I hope Apple fixes the badge systems in watchOS and iOS so it can accurately award badges regardless of what app we use for tracking workouts.