Reported layoffs at Apple are bolstering rumors that disparate health and fitness features may soon be consolidated into Apple’s Health app.
Apple tends to avoid huge, headline-grabbing rounds of job cuts. As crushing as job losses are for the people involved, they at least tend not to be giant signals to cynical investors about large-scale spending, and more like smaller scale stories that—if you read the tea leaves just right—can provide some granular insight about what’s going on. That appears to be the case with a small round of layoffs at Apple Fitness+ reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Did you know Apple made its own guided workouts as part of Apple Fitness+? If you’re an Apple Watch owner, and you’ve also shopped for similar services from, say, Peloton, then you’re in the niche Apple has been appealing to here. Gurman says there’s just been a round of layoffs affecting “a handful of employees” many of whom work on those aforementioned guided workouts.
Affected by the layoffs, according to Gurman, are the teams involved with Time to Walk, and Time to Run, part of a motivation-oriented Fitness+ feature that debuted in 2022. Apple describes Time to Run as “an audio running experience designed to help users become more consistent and better runners, featuring popular running routes in some of the most notable cities.”
Apple’s announcement of this feature came just after New Year’s Day in 2022, pegged to New Year’s resolution season. Its gentle, informative, introductory program seems designed for people just getting into exercise. Nike’s introductory program seems similarly non-agro, but I can see Apple having a tough time in this market. From the outside (I don’t use any of these apps), it seems like Apple’s friendly guided runs would be great for beginners, but that serious fitness junkies probably graduate to, or were already hooked on, more hardcore programs and devices—your Whoops and Garmins and such.
Judging from a different Gurman report from back in February, it sounds like Apple’s new head of services, Eddy Cue, sees room for improvement in health and fitness as well. He reportedly uses competitor health devices, and Gurman says he wants “broader changes to the health strategy.” Around the time of that earlier report, Apple reportedly revised a plan for an AI-powered virtual health coach app, codenamed “Mulberry.” Gurman said ideas from Mulberry would be integrated into Health.
So in his new report, Gurman says this small change at Fitness+ is part of that gradual shift. More layoffs may be coming to Fitness+ as part of an eventual merger of Health and Fitness+. The Health app was, after all, just given a huge revamp with iOS 27.2 beta. If Fitness+, or something that evolves from it, is going to exist entirely within Health, perhaps there’s just no more room for beginner audio guides for the New Year’s resolution crowd.
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