Credit: iDrop News / Elijah Waeterling

There actually appears to be a bug that affects Activity Competition awards. While there’s no way to tell how widespread it is, it seems to be fairly common.

• Basically, after you finish an activity competition, you should be able to see the resulting badges in your Activity app.
• Occasionally, you Apple Watch may even send you a notification letting you know that you earned said badges — though some users report that they never received any notification on completion.
• Your Apple Watch may even send you a notification letting you know that you earned said badges — though some users report that they never received any notification on completion.

But when you go to the appropriate section in the Activity app, there’s nothing there. The section will show “blank” silhouettes of the competition in question — even if you’ve completed it, or even won it.

Some reports also indicate similar problems with Activity Challenge awards, but we haven’t experienced them in our own testing. In any case, there are a couple things you can do to try and fix the problem.

How to Fix Apple Watch Activity and Competition Awards

First off, make sure that your Apple Watch and your iPhone are both updated to the latest software versions available.

Several Redditors also report success with simply restarting their iPhones and Apple Watches. You don’t have to Force Restart or do anything fancy.

1. Just power down your iPhone and Apple Watch.
2. Then, turn on your iPhone first and your Apple Watch second.

You can also try resetting your Apple Watch and iPhone sync settings.

1. Open the Watch app on your iPhone.
2. Tap General.
3. Tap Reset.
4. Tap Reset Sync Settings.

If none of these work for you, you may have to move on to the second “method” of fixing the issue: just wait.

Some users indicate that the badges appear after a few days. This seems to be the most reliable way of getting awards or badges to appear, though your own mileage may vary. One user said they had to wait eight days and restart their iPhone to have their Activity Awards show up. In our testing, we’ve waited up to three days for our awards to appear.

Will Apple Fix It?

We can’t independently verify whether this is on Apple’s radar, but it remains unpatched in the latest versions of iOS and watchOS. Some reports on social media and other forums stretch back several months.

But it’s also worth noting that this appears to be an issue related to iOS 12. So it’s still fairly new.

If you’ve been impacted by the bug, we recommend sending Apple a bug report via its Apple Watch feedback page.

That being said, it’s probable that Apple knows about the problem and will fix it in a future software update. But sending them a note could let them know that it’s a common enough issue to take seriously.