A new podcast episode is out. This time, I talk about a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time,
Apple Health has a 3.0 rating in the App Store. But have you ever thought about how almost nobody actively downloads it? You buy an iPhone, and it’s already there.
So what exactly is that 3.0 measuring?
I think the problem is that we’re using the wrong yardstick.
Consumer products live and die by engagement. Teams want you to open their app again tomorrow—and spend more time in it. Retention and time spent are everything to them.
But Apple Health wasn’t built around that logic at all. It’s more like infrastructure. You don’t need to open cloud backup every morning to make sure it’s still working, and you don’t applaud your pipes. Infrastructure is valuable because it’s reliable, trustworthy, and unobtrusive. Most of the time, you don’t even notice it’s there—that’s what success looks like.
Apple Health was built to meet the second set of standards, but it’s being judged by the first.
Of course, Apple Health has real challenges of its own. It has to handle more than 150 types of health data, coming from sources ranging from Apple Watch to third-party devices to healthcare providers, all flowing into HealthKit. That neutrality and compatibility come at a cost. Fitbit can build an end-to-end experience around its own hardware. Apple Health doesn’t have that option.
The very capability that makes it valuable also creates its most obvious usability problem.
Sometimes, an interface is just a reflection of the underlying structure.
Listen to the full episode here 👇
https://redcircle.com/shows/936a3212-92e5-41c7-b6f9-39e3596adeb8/episodes/63d064f4-007c-475b-8769-bcba354278a6
Apple Health has a 3.0 rating in the App Store. But have you ever thought about how almost nobody actively downloads it? You buy an iPhone, and it’s already there.
So what exactly is that 3.0 measuring?
I think the problem is that we’re using the wrong yardstick.
Consumer products live and die by engagement. Teams want you to open their app again tomorrow—and spend more time in it. Retention and time spent are everything to them.
But Apple Health wasn’t built around that logic at all. It’s more like infrastructure. You don’t need to open cloud backup every morning to make sure it’s still working, and you don’t applaud your pipes. Infrastructure is valuable because it’s reliable, trustworthy, and unobtrusive. Most of the time, you don’t even notice it’s there—that’s what success looks like.
Apple Health was built to meet the second set of standards, but it’s being judged by the first.
Of course, Apple Health has real challenges of its own. It has to handle more than 150 types of health data, coming from sources ranging from Apple Watch to third-party devices to healthcare providers, all flowing into HealthKit. That neutrality and compatibility come at a cost. Fitbit can build an end-to-end experience around its own hardware. Apple Health doesn’t have that option.
The very capability that makes it valuable also creates its most obvious usability problem.
Sometimes, an interface is just a reflection of the underlying structure.
Listen to the full episode here 👇
https://redcircle.com/shows/936a3212-92e5-41c7-b6f9-39e3596adeb8/episodes/63d064f4-007c-475b-8769-bcba354278a6