About a year and a half ago, I wrote about how Apple’s Health app is a data silo. It’s hard to use the data it records, and it’s impossible to import data to the app. Unlike many of Apple’s apps, the Health app does not sync to iCloud; most likely because of privacy worries.
But this can be problematic if you ever need to set up your iPhone as a new device. While your phone’s backups contain Health data, setting up a phone as a new device means that you don’t import the backup, and there’s no way to get that health data back. All your historic data is lost.
You can export data from the Health app as in XML file, but the Health app has no import feature. A new app from Lionheart Software, the $3 Health Data Importer, solves that problem. It allows you to import an XML file to the Health app, and to chose which data sources get imported. (You can have data that was originally recorded by the Health app and your iPhone or Apple Watch, or third-party apps.)
You may never need this, but in some cases, troubleshooting requires that you ignore a backup and set up a new iPhone from scratch. Health Data Importer lets you do this, so you don’t lose your data.