Disable Samsung Health Steps Counting on a Phone
Samsung Health is a rather advanced app which supports scenarios most of the people do not think about. For example, if you have several fitness wearables connected to your phone. Like a galaxy watch and a band.
Note: if you need to disable step counting on a Garmin watch – check this article
It also tries to be smart and combines steps counted by the Samsung Health on your phone with steps, counted by your watch. For people who wear smartwatches 24/7 this is probably and overkill. But for other groups of users this could be useful.
Usually this just works, and most of us do not even notice that the Samsung Health counts steps on both, on the watch and on the phone.
So, you can make sure that you walk enough steps per day. By the way, “10000” is not an accurate daily steps goal from the health point of view — check “How many steps per day do you really need?” article if you are interested in the goal which is backed by researches.
However, sometimes multi-device step counting does not work well. I saw two type of reports:
- Number of steps is doubled (data from different sources is added, instead of being properly merged)
- Samsung Health drains noticeable amount of battery on some phones (bad implementation of step counting on hardware, drivers level?)
To mitigate these problems one can disable step counting in the Samsung Health phone app. Below is a step-by-step instruction how to this:
Step 1: tap on the “Steps” block to get into detailed steps screen:
Step #2: Select “…” menu (right upper corner) and there tap on “select steps data to show”
Step #3: Select “mobile phone” to show steps counted by the phone itself only
Step #4: Now “…” menu will contain an option to pause steps counting (on the phone) — do this.
Step #5: Now configure the app to show all steps again.
Done! In reality, this is not that complicated as it could like 🙂
Since step counting on your phone is paused, “all steps” literary equal to steps counted by your watch.
