I am trying to find the best way for the Apple Watch to transfer data with the iPhone even when they are not near each other. An example would be how do water tracking apps sync data with the watch. Do they use CloudKit or something else?
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Answers
Apple watches can use wifi, bluetooth, and cellular (if the device is compatible). As the Apple website states (Read this to learn more), an Apple watch uses bluetooth for short range communication, like when an iphone is nearby as it uses BLE (Bluetooth low energy) which helps preserve battery. For long range communication it uses wifi. Or otherwise if the Apple watch is cellular compatible it can use cellular data.
Based on what I can understand from your question, I’d say you can think of this as two-way communication between your Apple Watch app and the paired iPhone app.
There’s an interesting sample project from Apple that you can download and play with here
On the sample project you can see how this is accomplished but handling Watch Connectivity Background Tasks in which you could transfer user info and manage the outstanding transfers, transfer files, view transfer progress, and manage the outstanding transfers.