‘Apple Health+’ May Be Coming to Your iPhone in 2026
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One of Apple’s biggest ambitions is to make a positive impact on the health and wellness of its users, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that rumors of a more advanced “Health+” service have been circulating for years. However, it’s only over the past few months that these have begun to take a concrete form, and it appears that Apple is still on track to launch its holistic new health coaching service sometime next year.
Early reports of “Health+” were all over the place. Some reports suggested that Apple was building a subscription service for medical professionals that would offer doctors real-time access to their patients’ health data. In that form, it would be an extension of Apple’s Health Records feature, which provides seamless sharing of medical records with participating hospitals and other institutions.
Apple’s goals came into better focus two years ago, when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman revealed that Apple was working on several new health features for iOS 17, including a Health app for the iPad and an AI-driven health coaching service that would include the ability to track emotional well-being.
At the time, Gurman shared that Appel was working on a project code-named “Quartz” that would combine a dedicated app and a new subscription service designed to encourage a healthy lifestyle by offering coaching to develop positive habits for exercise, eating, and sleep. While some of Gurman’s predictions arrived in iOS 17 (and iPadOS 17), including the new iPad Health app and a basic mood tracking tool with which you could manually record how you’re feeling throughout the day, the broader AI-driven coach was nowhere to be found.
To be fair, even the early rumors suggested that this part wouldn’t likely be ready before iOS 18, but that release also came and went without any new developments. In January, Gurman said Apple was still working on it, but later reported in March that Apple had pivoted from its original “Quartz” vision into a more sophisticated AI project dubbed “Mulberry.”
Project Mulberry was considerably more ambitious, with Apple hoping to not only cover health and wellness coaching but also create a new AI agent that could at least partially replicate a real doctor.
An Apple-supported health study published a new research paper last month that seemingly confirms Apple is working on leveraging large-scale AI models to analyze health data, and also provides a fascinating glimpse into the company’s plans for its AI-driven health service. Perhaps most significantly, the study demonstrated an ability to effectively process and draw inferences from aggregated historical health data without the need for real-time monitoring.
In other words, Apple would be able to create AI algorithms that more intelligently analyze the data that’s already stored on your Apple Watch and Health app, helping you make sense of it and providing recommendations for improvement or guidance on areas where you might want to seek professional medical advice.
In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman confirmed that the paid “Apple Health+” service is still expected to debut next year. While it’s still not entirely clear what it will ultimately look like — Apple could be forced to scale back its ambitions depending on how well everything fits together — Gurman describes it as an “AI-based health coach with nutrition planning and medical suggestions.”
While it’s almost certain to be a paid service, there’s no word on what Apple plans to charge for it. It will likely be bundled into an Apple One plan of some kind. Still, we could also see Apple expanding its Apple Fitness+ service to include at least some of the new health coaching features, or possibly integrating the two services into a health and fitness bundle.
[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.]
