Friends and challenges with friends

Friends are the people you know and train with: training buddies, family, colleagues. Open Friends in the menu (in the app: the You tab, coaches More).

Your @name

The first time you choose your @name: 3 to 20 characters, lowercase letters, numbers, dot and underscore, starting with a letter. After the first change you can change it every 30 days. You also choose who can find you: Anyone who knows my @name or Only through my invite link. Under 18 nobody can find you through search.

Adding friends

• With your link: tap Invite, then Share (WhatsApp is in there too) or Copy link. Whoever opens it and taps Become friends is your friend; nothing happens without that tap. A link works for 30 days and 20 people. Reset link makes a new one and the old one stops working.
• By @name: type the whole @name under Find a friend by @name and tap Send request. The search finds exact names only, never similar ones.
• Requests shows what waits for you: Accept or Decline. Nobody is told about a decline.
• A link that does not open: tap Enter an invite code and type the 10 characters from the link.

What friends see

Your name, your picture, your @name and the challenges you both take part in. More only if you switch it on in Settings under Friends, one item at a time: Workouts this week, Streak and Steps 7 days. Steps are health data, so that switch asks for your consent first. Friends never see your weight, body values, photos, meals or health notes, and your coach sees none of it unless they are also your friend or in the same challenge.

Start a challenge

1. Open Friends, then Challenges, and tap Start a challenge.
2. Pick What counts (Steps, Workouts or Calories), the start (today, tomorrow, next Monday or a day within the next 14) and the length (3 to 30 days).
3. Pick up to 19 friends, or invite Through your link, then tap Start challenge.

What counts

• Steps: only steps from Apple Health, at most 60,000 a day.
• Workouts: completed workouts, at most 2 a day, logged by the next day.
• Calories: only active energy from Apple Health, at most 3,000 kcal a day. Logged calories and meals never count. For 18 and over.

Steps and calories count only from Apple Health, which only an app on the iPhone can read, not a browser. Without Apple Health your score is 0. Apple Health data can still arrive for 2 days after the end, so the result is provisional until then.

Health data and your consent

For steps and calories you confirm once per challenge what everyone taking part sees: your name, your place and your current total since the first day, updated as data comes in until the last. Nothing is counted or shown before that tap, also not for the person who started it. Leave ends your sharing, and your number disappears from the leaderboard at once.

Leaving, removing, blocking

• Leave takes you out of a challenge. You can only rejoin with a new invite.
• Whoever started a challenge can Leave it too: it goes on for the others, and you can join again while it runs.
• Whoever started a challenge can Remove people or End challenge, which deletes it for everybody. A reported challenge can only be ended once we have looked at it.
• On a friend's profile you can End friendship, Block or Report. Nobody is told when you end a friendship or block someone. If you block your coach or one of your athletes, your coaching chat is locked too, and they see there that they cannot message you. The coach's posts and notifications stop as well; messages about bookings and payments still arrive. The people you blocked are listed in Settings under Friends, at the bottom, where you can unblock them.

How many

One running challenge you started is included. With Premium for athletes, or Pro and Elite for coaches, you can run up to 5 at once. Joining a friend's challenge is always free, and you can have up to 500 friends.

Good to know: Share result makes a picture with your place and your own number only. Ava can show your friends and challenges, send a request to an exact @name, answer requests, give you your invite link and start a challenge. Of your friends Ava sees only first names and @names, never their numbers, and the consent for steps and calories is always your own tap.