Apple unveiled "Healthkit," a mobile app that allows users to monitor their blood pressure, heart rate, or weight, using the iPhone.
Apple CEO Tim Cook presented the app to 1,000 Apple engineers and 5,000 third-party developers during the Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
"The 'Healthkit' has the most potential for the future," said Nils Kassube, director of development at the Germany-based consulting firm Newscope, to Reuters. "Those of us that are interested in health need a platform for sharing information." Apple is working on fitness tracking with Nike Inc, and the Mayo Clinic on the new feature, which will be included in the latest mobile software.
The Healthkit app promised to help developers make their own applications more useful. Users have the option to pick the information they want to share to their doctors, and can also link their nutrition app to their fitness apps to monitor the number of calories consumed per day.
Noticeably absent in this year's opening day was the display of devices that Apple normally flaunts during such events. But the company seemed to have good reasons for showing off changes to the software that its devices run on, instead of demonstrating new products. This annual June event was for Apple's thousands of developers to familiarize themselves with the software that will run the apps they would develop for Apple. Apple aimed to make it easy for its 9 million developers to create innovative apps before anything else to mitigate Google's monopoly on the market. Google, via its Android operating system, accounts for roughly 80 percent of smart phones sold worldwide, compared to 10 percent of Apple's iOS.
Apple showed that it decided to shift its focus on improving its main software platforms, finding new ways for apps to talk to each other and developing a new programming language to help developers create more apps.
