Apple Pulls Apps After Last-Minute Delays To HealthKit

All the hype swirling around the potential of Apple's AAPL +0.71% new health-tracking service HealthKit is getting a reality check today: Apple has reportedly begun pulling apps from its App Store that sync with the new HealthKit framework. Apple hasn’t said why officially, but reports suggest a last-minute delay to the new service’s development.

Developer Brian Mueller of Carrot Fit said via Twitter TWTR -0.26% that his app had been removed from the App Store because HealthKit wasn’t ready for launch. Later he said the service wouldn’t be ready for the rest of this week.

The delay coincides with Apple’s big launch today of iOS 8, its updated mobile operating system. On Friday Apple’s larger-sized iPhone 6 also goes on sale.

It’s also not the first time a new service from Apple has got delayed. Its SMS Continuity service which lets iOS users answer SMS messages from their iPads was also pushed back to October.

HealthKit is not an app but a back-end framework that allows third-party apps to sync with Apple’s new and proprietary health tracking app, Health.

Health, which lets users chart metrics like weight, sleep and calorie intake, appears to be in working order and can be downloaded as part of today’s iOS 8 update. But a crucial section of the app is “Sources,” where Health obtains data from third-party apps who have requested permission to sync with the HealthKit framework. It would appear that until Apple can fully launch HealthKit, that section of Health will remain empty and the app itself largely unusable (unless users manually add data points like weight or body temperature).

Apple announced HealthKit in June at its World World Wide developer’s conference, and positioned the service as a key feature to iOS 8. The idea was that it would solve the problem of messy, disparate data from fitness tracking apps and wearables by helping to sync it all into one place, the Health app.

Tim Cook said in a recent interview with Charlie Rosethat health care represented a “wide open field to make some really profound contributions.”

“You can begin to take all of the data that’s in all of your health apps and aggregate those,” he said when describing HealthKit. “You might elect just to use that yourself. You might elect to interact with your doctor on them.

“This is yet another way to being to build a comprehensive view of your life which should empower you to take care of yourself over time, and when you need help, it empowers you to take certain data to your doctor to get help from them,” he added. “All while guarding your privacy so that nobody is getting the data if you don’t want them to have the data… And no, we’re not keeping it.”

References 

Forbes