Apple Introduces Health App, A Wellable For Consumers

When Apple announces a new product, the industry takes notice.  Apple’s recent announcement of Health made headlines and created a buzz of excitement in the mobile health industry.

The Health app is a consumer facing mobile app that will be pre-loaded on iPhones and included with the iOS 8 upgrade.  Health aggregates data from a number of different mobile apps and wearable devices and provides users with a single, easy-to-use dashboard to view all their data.  Physical activity, sleep, and nutrition data is seamlessly tracked and stored in one place.

If you’re a reader of the Wellable blog or familiar with Wellable’s product, Apple’s approach to the health market may sound similar to Wellable – it is.

Since launching Wellable over a year ago, our belief has been that the best approach to the wellness market is through an aggregation platform – a platform that provides users with a single, easy-to-use dashboard to manage their multi-app and multi-device experience.  We can’t ask for a better validation of Wellable’s model and approach to market than Apple following suit a year later– thank you Apple.

So is Apple now competing against Wellable?

Not at all.  In fact, Apple’s Health app is a huge win for Wellable and the wellness industry as a whole.

While Apple is focused on the consumer market, Wellable remains focused on bringing consumer technology to the enterprise market.  Apple makes Wellable’s job of educating the market easier by increasing awareness of mobile health technology.  Apple’s marketing juggernaut will bring mobile health further mainstream and into the lives of thousands who never considered using a mobile health app before.  The barrier of having to download a health app will be removed for many.  Because new iPhones will be pre-loaded with the Health app, thousands of people will have effectively “downloaded” a mobile health app before ever turning on their phone.

In addition to increasing awareness, we expect that Apple’s move into the mobile health market will fuel additional health app and wearable device development.  There will be major strides in health innovation and also an increase in the number of health apps available in the market.  This is a major win for health consumers and for other companies like Wellable that leverage consumer app and wearable device technology.  Unfortunately, this also means that navigating the app market (identifying the good from the bad) will become increasingly challenging.  Wellable’s curation of the app market will become more valuable for employers and other organizations looking to incorporate mobile health apps into a corporate wellness program.

When explaining their company or product, startup founders often associate their brand with other, more successful companies.  For example, you may here a startup founder say, “we’re the Facebook of mobile payments,” or “our company is like Airbnb, but for the car industry.”  Well, today, we give Apple permission to say, their new Health app is “Wellable for consumers.”