Apple Puts Virtual Health Coach On Hold Amid Tough Competition
The California-based tech giant is facing competition from Samsung Electronics and Strava, with AI competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic bringing their healthcare offerings to the market.
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[Image source: Pankaj Kirdatt/MITSMR Middle East]
In an effort to approach the wellness segment, Apple has reportedly scaled back its plan for a virtual health coach initiative, code-named Mulberry, and plans to gradually add select features to its Health app. The project was still in early development and was never publicly announced.
The decision to pull the plug comes after a leadership change at Apple’s health organization, with Eddy Cue taking over from Jeff Williams last year.
Cue has pointed out Apple’s need to move faster and become more competitive in the space, stating that the iPhone maker’s existing plans for new health services do not meet the bar. Notably, Cue is also planning to make changes to Apple Fitness+, a guided workouts app.
Newer alternatives such as Oura Health Oy and Whoop are offering more compelling and utility features than those offered by Apple.
The California-based tech giant is facing competition from Samsung Electronics and Strava, with AI competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic bringing their healthcare offerings to the market.
In early January, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health to deliver useful health and fitness information to its users without making a formal diagnosis. Notably, healthcare queries rank among the platform’s most common, with over 230 million people worldwide asking health and wellness related questions weekly.
OpenAI followed this with the announcement of OpenAI for Healthcare, a set of products and services to help healthcare organizations. The offerings include ChatGPT for Healthcare and the OpenAI API. All OpenAI for Healthcare products are powered by GPT‑5.2 models and have had its over 600,000 model outputs spanning 30 areas of focus being evaluated by over 260 globally licensed physicians across 60 countries.
On the heels of OpenAI’s releases, rival Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare, targeted towards healthcare providers and patients. Its offerings include partnering with HealthEx to provide patients with all of their electronic medical records in a single place and allowing users to connect their personal medical records to Anthropic’s Claude so the chatbot can answer health-related questions.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have stated that no data will be used for model training.
As Apple continues to chart the right strategy for its healthcare offerings, it is eyeing the integration of an advanced Siri chatbot with iOS 27 to support more advanced health-related queries across the Health app and its ecosystems.
