Apple Reportedly Scales Back iOS 27 Plans for ‘Health+’
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One of the biggest features slated for iOS 27 may now be on the back burner, as Apple reportedly scales back its plans for its rumored “Health+” service.
While Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman hinted at this in late January, saying that Apple had “returned to the drawing board on Health-related AI features,” he doubled down yesterday in a a more in-depth report that says that the long-rumored “Project Mulberry” has effectively been shelved.
Apple has naturally never said anything specific about its AI-related health ambitions, with executives like Tim Cook making only oblique statements about what they think AI can bring to the table overall. However, Cook has also long said that he wanted health to be Apple’s greatest legacy, so it hasn’t been hard to connect the dots and infer that the company was doing work at the intersection of AI and health technology.
Further, Apple’s move toward a services-oriented business made it easy to predict even years ago that a “Health+” service would eventually be on the table, even if analysts could only make wild guesses as to what that might be.
The Shelving of Project Mulberry
In recent years, it’s Gurman who’s given us the most insight into Apple’s AI health plans, starting with reports in 2023 on a technology code-named “Quartz” that would be an AI-driven health coaching service with technology for tracking emotions.
While the mood tracking landed in iOS 17 as Gurman predicted, the coaching features were nowhere to be seen. Apparently, as Apple Intelligence came on the scene, the iPhone maker believed it could do even more, and Project Quartz morphed into Project Mulberry, with the aim of using an AI agent to create an “AI doctor.”
As work on that progressed, Gurman believed Apple was aiming for a 2026 release of Health+ in iOS 27, andthere were certainly other indications that Apple was hard at work on this, but the landscape seems to have changed since then.
For one thing, more established players like OpenAI have entered this space. While Gurman only mentions the new ChatGPT Health in passing as an example of how competition is heating up, the new service has also proven to be deeply flawed at this stage, which could be one of the things making Apple rethink its approach. After all, even if Apple can completely nail AI-based health coaching — and that’s a very big “if” — it’s entering a market where customers may be soured by the flailing efforts of others.
The Eddy Cue Era of Apple Health
However, Gurman says this may also be more about a desire to move faster, not slower. While the new service was reportedly a top priority for Apple’s VP of Heath and Fitness, Dr. Sumbul Desai, the decision to retire the Health+ service reportedly came after responsibility for the division shifted from erstwhile chief operating officer Jeff Williams to Apple services chief Eddy Cue following Williams’ retirement last year.
Source tell Gurman that Cue is pushing for Apple to “move faster and be more competitive in health,” and doesn’t think the proposed “Health+” service would offer enough compelling and useful features, nor be nimble enough to keep up with rival offerings like Oura and Whoop.
The goal was to create a system that could generate detailed health reports and — for the first time — deliver AI-driven recommendations to help users improve their well-being. The major new service would have combined new surveys and health assessments with data from Apple Watches and external lab reports.
Mark Gurman
Instead, it seems that Cue wants to break up the band into a set of solo acts. Instead of a single, unified health coaching service, Gurman says that Apple now plans to roll out smaller features “individually over time within its Health app.”
This would presumably improve Apple’s agility in rolling health features out more quickly as they’re ready instead of waiting for the whole package to be wrapped up in a bow. However, it could also help to avoid triggering regulatory scrutiny of a full “AI doctor,” and the delays that would undoubtedly come with it.
What to Expect in iOS 27
Some of the smaller features that Apple has already developed could still arrive in iOS 27, including the educational video content filmed at a purpose-built studio Apple set up in Oakland last year and AI-generated health summaries that help translate raw data into plain English — one area in which Apple’s Health app has been lagging behind competitors like Samsung Health.
Apple is also reportedly working on several more advanced initiatives, such as using an iPhone camera to analyze and evaluate how a person walks. Apple is also working on an AI chatbot to answer wellness questions, apparently as a separate project from the Gemini-powered Siri, but Gurman says it also plans to leverage “Project Campos,” the conversational Siri chatbot expected in iOS 27, to “support more advanced health-related queries across the Health app and its operating systems,” which sounds like it could effectively create its own version of ChatGPT Health as a skill within the larger Siri redesign.
While many assumed that Health+ would be a subscription service, that was never a certainty. Reports that Apple was rethinking Fitness+ led to speculation that it could be looking at a way of combining the health coaching with the existing fitness offering. That might have helped it avoid some of the negative optics of charging solely for a wellness service by building a more value-added bundle, but it’s likely the company’s brass hadn’t yet figured out for themselves.
Cue is still considering changes to Fitness+, Gurman says, but doesn’t provide any insight into what those might be. This could still become an umbrella for the piecemeal “Health+” features that are expected to gradually trickle into the Health app, helping Cue to streamline Apple’s services portfolio, but it seems the company is still reevaluating its overall strategy in this area, leaving everything up in the air for now.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
