Although the Apple Watch prefers to track calories rather than steps, you can still get your count.
If you're coming from a conventional fitness tracker, that might be confusing at first. How many calories you burned or how many minutes of brisk activity you engaged in might not correlate with the steps you've gotten used to. Luckily, Apple Watch will still tell you your steps, you've just got to know where to look. And once you do, making the transition to calories can be much easier!
How to check your step count on your Apple Watch
- Launch the Activity app on your Apple Watch.
- Navigate to the Activity view like shown below if you aren't there already.
- Use the Digital Crown or your finger to scroll down.
- Here is where you'll find your step count and some additional information.

You can also find the same information in the Activity app for iPhone, just swipe all the way to the bottom.

Reader comments
How to view your step count on Apple Watch
So are your steps calculated by wearing your watch, or are they tracked on your phone needing you to carry your phone with you to track steps?
The Watch can count your steps without the iPhone present, like you can take a walk without your iPhone and the watch will give that info to the iPhone when it next "sees" it. Similarly with only your Watch you could have listened to music resident on the Watch with bluetooth headphones, again without the iPhone. I don't know of much else the Watch can do in isolation, but Apple seems to have had fitness in mind for not absolutely having to have your iPhone on you during exercise.
So far, this thing is not very accurate. It told me I stood for 5 hours yesterday, when in fact I sat all day. Didn't stand for more than 10 minutes.
That's probably accurate. It's actually telling you that during five different hour-periods (not necessarily in a row), you stood for at least a minute. It's just a simple way of encouraging you to get up and move around at least for a minute each hour during the day, i.e., discouraging you from sitting for hours at a time without standing up and moving around.
Number 1 reason why I want to have the device. I believe if you leave the phone behind and then come back to it, the data in the two should sync. Hope so.
My step count is significantly lower than when using my previous device. Either one of the devices (previous was a Garmin vivosmart) is really or something else is wrong somewhere. Relatively similar days show significantly less steps with the watch. I don't know how to figure out which is correct.
They say that accuracy is much better when you calibrate the Apple Watch. Here is a link to Apple's instructions of how to do this.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204516
Great advice! Going to give this a shot! Thanks!