Which running apps quietly need a watch

A roundup tells you the price and shows you the screens. It will almost never tell you whether the app is a watch feature with a phone companion bolted on. That distinction decides whether an app works for you at all, and it is the one column nobody prints.

This page sorts running apps by what they require. Not by what they do. Every row is either a sentence quoted from the vendor's own documentation with the date it was checked, or is marked as not established. If you are working out what a phone records on its own, this is the other half of that question.

Why hardware dependency is never a column

A hardware requirement is not a feature.

It is a precondition. Comparison pages are built around features, and a precondition does not fit under a column headed Training plans or Social, so it lands in prose, or nowhere at all.

Vendors are not exactly hiding it either. The sentence naming a required device usually sits in support documentation, not on the product page, one or two clicks below whatever a roundup would link to, and somebody assembling a list of ten apps in an afternoon will not go and find that sentence ten times.

The cost lands on one reader. Somebody running with a phone and no watch installs an app recommended for beginners. They open it and find a training plan waiting for a device they do not own.

Three categories: phone complete, partly gated, hardware only

Three categories cover almost every app. A fourth state covers the rest.

1. Phone complete. Everything the app advertises runs on the phone in your hand. A watch adds convenience, not capability.
2. Partly gated. The app records from the phone, but at least one advertised feature is delivered only through a watch, and the marketing does not separate the two.
3. Hardware only. The coaching product is a feature of a watch, and the phone app is where you set it up and review it afterwards.
4. Not established. The vendor publishes nothing you can quote. That is not a yes, and it should never be written up as one.

These categories describe requirement, not presence. An app can ship an excellent watch build and still be phone complete, because a watch app you may use is a different thing from a watch you must buy.

What each vendor says about its own requirement

Each row quotes the vendor, or says that no sentence could be found. Nothing here is inferred from a feature list, a screenshot or a review.

Two of these rows are permission statements, not recommendations.

Garmin's sentence puts the plans inside a compatible watch, with the phone as the place you set them up and review them afterwards. Samsung documents its Running coach as a Watch8 feature and separately names an Android version and a Samsung Health version, so several conditions have to be true at once before the feature appears at all.

Read the rest against each other. Runna's sentence is the reason it sits in the phone complete column, because the vendor names the phone side path itself instead of leaving it to be inferred, while Strava appears twice on purpose: the app records a run from the phone, and one of its analysis features carries a hardware line of its own. The Nike sentence shows how a feature list can bury a requirement, since it names heart rate in the same breath as speed, distance, route and elevation, and a phone on its own can produce every item on that list except heart rate.

Garmin's own device manual says the same thing from the other end. It describes the plan arriving on the wrist: "When you start a plan, the Garmin coach glance is added to the glance loop on your Forerunner® watch." Forerunner 265 owner's manual, checked 2 August 2026

Features that silently degrade without a watch

Gating is loud.

Degradation is quiet. An app that needs a sensor you do not have will usually show a dash, or simply never produce the score, and nothing on screen explains the absence. These are the usual four.

• Anything derived from continuous heart rate, including training load, recovery and readiness. Garmin puts the wear requirement plainly: "You'll need to wear your watch as much as possible (including while you sleep) so it can factor in metrics, including your VO2 max, lactate threshold, training history and more." Garmin blog, checked 2 August 2026
• Prompts during a session, which some products deliver only to a wrist. Runna is the counterexample worth knowing about, because it documents the phone side path explicitly: "With Record on Device you can now receive live coaching, even if you don't have a smartwatch." Runna support, checked 2 August 2026
• Audio coverage on the watch itself, which is not uniform even among supported models: "Many popular GPS running watches are compatible with Runna. Features will vary by device model, and not all devices will support audio cues." Runna support, checked 2 August 2026
• Anything computed from motion instead of position. A phone in a pocket and a device strapped to a wrist are not sampling the same movement, and neither one will tell you that the figure changed meaning.

Heart rate as the honest dividing line

A phone has no heart rate sensor.

Use heart rate as the one test that sorts running apps quickly. Every heart rate figure in a phone only setup arrived from something else: a paired watch, a chest strap, or the platform health store where another device had already written its readings.

So any feature built on heart rate is a hardware feature carrying a software name. Zones, effort scores, recovery estimates and any plan that adjusts to how hard yesterday felt all sit on that side of the line, while distance, time, pace, splits and route sit on the other side, because the phone can measure those itself.

Apply the same line to leaderboards. A board that scores heart rate is ranking equipment alongside running, and the runner with a strap is not competing on the same axis as the runner with a phone. None of this makes heart rate training wrong. It makes it a purchase, and a purchase belongs in the requirements column, not in the feature list.

Where Runflake sits, held to the same test

Runflake is phone first. One thing separates it from every row in the table above: Runflake is built and is not yet published to the App Store or Google Play, so there is no download available today. The requirement statement is narrow on purpose: a watch is not required for distance, pace, splits, cadence or elevation. That is a claim about what you must own, not a claim about what exists. A Wear OS build and an Apple Watch build exist and are intended for the first release, and the Wear OS build has been verified on a Wear OS 5 emulator with a signed release APK.

Heart rate follows the same line here. The phone has no heart rate sensor, so a run with zero heart rate samples is the normal case, and heart rate can only arrive from a paired watch, a BLE strap, or the platform health store. It is barred by written rule from every judgement axis, including rankings, goals, XP and course completion, on the reasoning that including it would make the metric favour whoever owns a watch. Rankings carry a hardware line of their own, in the opposite direction: only outdoor GPS runs enter a ranking, indoor and treadmill runs are excluded, and a run must have an uploaded GPS track to count at all. That is a narrower promise than measuring effort, and it is the version a phone first product can actually keep. There is more detail in what the app records and what leaves the phone.

How to check any app before you install it

1. Read the compatibility field, not the descriptionA store listing names supported devices in a fixed field. The description is marketing copy, and it will list a watch as a feature whether or not the watch is a requirement.
2. Search the vendor's own support siteUse the feature name plus the words requires or compatible. The sentence that settles the question is almost always in support documentation rather than on the product page.
3. Notice where the feature is documentedIf the only help article for a feature sits under a heading naming a watch, that is your answer even when no sentence uses the word required.
4. Ask what the feature measuresA number that can only come from a sensor worn against skin needs hardware, no matter how the app describes itself.
5. Treat silence as unknownWhen no vendor page states the requirement, write unknown and move on. An absent sentence is not a promise, and a review is not a vendor.

It takes a few minutes per app and it survives redesigns, because it reads the documentation, not the landing page. Every quote above carries the date it was read. Check your next app the same way before you install anything.