How wearable verification works on Pledro

The single most important rule on Pledro is short: nothing counts until a wearable verifies it. This guide is what that means in practice, at the level of detail a reasonable person is owed before committing anything to a challenge.

Where do the numbers come from?

The device, and only the device. Distance, duration, heart rate, steps and the rest are read from your wearable through Apple Health, server-side, after the activity has finished.

There is no screen in Pledro where you type a result. There never has been. A workout that was hand-entered into the health app on your phone is detected as hand-entered and refused, because it is a typed number wearing a workout's clothes.

This is also why there is no "start a workout in Pledro" button. You connect a wearable once, then just train — the app does not need to be open, and most wearables only publish an activity once it has finished anyway.

What has to be true for an activity to count?

Four things, and each one closes a specific hole.

1. It matches the challenge type. A swim does not complete a cycling challenge.
2. It happened inside the challenge window. Before it opens or after it closes, it does not count.
3. It started after you entered. You cannot train first, see that you would have won, and then enter to claim it.
4. The wearable was connected before you entered. Connecting one afterwards does not retrospectively make last week countable.

The third is the one people try hardest to get around, so it is worth being blunt about:

Entering is what starts your clock. A run you did this morning cannot be claimed by a challenge you join this afternoon.

What is actually being checked?

Two different questions, and confusing them is what makes most anti-cheat writing useless.

Did you meet the target? That is arithmetic against the rule the challenge published — 10km, four sessions, 70,000 steps.

Is this record plausible? That is the verification, and it looks at whether the measurements agree with each other and with human physiology. A run at a speed no runner holds. A heart rate that does not move for forty minutes. A distance that appears without the effort that would produce it. Signals that contradict one another.

We are not going to publish the thresholds, for the obvious reason that a published threshold is a target. What we will say is the principle behind them, which matters more:

A wearable that cannot measure something is never asked to prove it. A heart-rate-zone challenge counts minutes above a threshold, so it needs a minute-by-minute trace and cannot be backed by a wearable that only writes a summary. A challenge you are equipped to complete and a challenge your wearable is equipped to prove have to be the same challenge, or somebody pays an entry fee for a result that could never have been recorded.

What happens when something is flagged?

It is held, not refused, and you are told.

That distinction is the whole of our approach. A wrong refusal takes an entry fee from an honest person because of a defect in our own rules. A wrong hold costs a reviewer a minute and delays a result. Those are not remotely equal, so the system is built to hold and let a person look.

A held result is never rewarded automatically while it is held. If it clears, it counts. If a challenge is waiting on one, results land later than the usual hour, exactly as they would for any other review.

How does Pledro stop one person completing two accounts' challenges?

One wearable, one account. The link is held on our servers, not in the app, and a second account cannot claim a wearable that is already speaking for somebody else. The same activity cannot be counted twice across accounts either.

Step challenges carry an extra rule, and it is the one that costs honest people something: a step only counts from a device that is worn. A phone in a pocket counts nothing. Step targets are the easiest thing on any platform to inflate, and a phone can be shaken, swung, or handed to somebody with a longer commute.

Why go to this much trouble?

Because the alternative is a scoreboard of claims.

If completing could be self-reported, then the standings are fiction, the reward is shared with people who did not do the work, and the person genuinely worse off is the one who got up in the rain. Every rule on this page exists so that finishing means what it says — and so that the entry you get back is one you actually earned.

It is also the substance of what makes Pledro a performance product rather than something else. The reasoning is in the classification guide.