Samsung Galaxy

Samsung phones record your steps in Samsung Health. For those steps to reach The Ismaili app, Samsung Health needs to write them into Health Connect.

Set it up

1. Open Samsung Health.
2. Tap the menu (three lines, bottom right), then Settings.
3. Tap Health Connect.
4. Turn on Steps and Distance.
5. Open The Ismaili app and go to Active Living.
6. Tap Connect Health, and allow all three permissions — Steps, Distance and Active calories burned.

Samsung Health's home screen. The menu is bottom right.

Verified on a real device

Verified on a Samsung Galaxy running Android 13. After allowing all three permissions the dashboard opened correctly, and steps recorded overnight appeared the next morning.

Two things that surprise people

Both of these are Samsung limitations. Neither means your setup is wrong, and neither is something we can fix from the app.

Your existing history will not appear

Samsung Health syncs forwards only. It does not hand over activity you recorded before you connected it.

So yesterday's steps will not show up — but tomorrow's will. If you connected today and see nothing, walk around with your phone and check again in a few minutes. More detail in my older activity is missing.

The energy ring will stay at zero, and often distance too

Samsung Health does not write active calories into Health Connect at all, so the energy ring will stay at zero permanently. There is nothing to fix.

It also only writes distance for workouts you record deliberately, not for ordinary walking — so the distance ring commonly reads zero as well, even while your steps update perfectly.

If either ring matters to you, a Fitbit or a watch that writes both will fill them. See the energy ring stays at zero.

What this looks like in practice

Captured on a Samsung Galaxy running Android 13, with Samsung Health connected and working: the dashboard showed 24 steps, 0 distance, 0 energy, and Health Connect listed a Steps category and nothing else.

Steps working while the other two rings sit at zero is the normal, healthy state of a Samsung setup — not a sign that anything is broken.

Steps counting normally; distance and energy at zero, as expected on Samsung.

Galaxy Watch

A Galaxy Watch records into Samsung Health on your phone, and Samsung Health passes it to Health Connect. So once the steps above are done, your watch data follows the same path with nothing extra to set up.

Make sure your watch has synced recently — open Samsung Health and pull down to refresh if the numbers look stale.

It still shows zero

• Check something is actually writing data: my dashboard shows zero
• Check background syncing has not been stopped: my steps stopped updating
• Or tell us what is happening