Today, onstage at WWDC, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announced a handful of updates for HealthKit: The platform will now track how much water you drink, how often you’re sitting, and your UV exposure.
Oh, and also, reproductive health!
Federighi quickly slipped in that HealthKit will finally start offering reproductive health information, which was not included in the original launch. HealthKit was sold as a comprehensive tracking system, but seemed to forget that women exist and that we menstruate. The oversight did not go unnoticed.
Now, Apple is quietly righting this wrong—although, to what degree remains to be seen. “Reproductive Health” certainly sounds like a feature that would include a period and/or ovulation tracker, but no details were given. The iPhone is hugely popular with women, and the App Store hosts a veritable cornucopia of menstruation-related apps. The fact that Apple launched HealthKit without acknowledging this is dumbfounding, and we can only hope that the update includes a fully fledged feature for women’s health. To be fair, Fitbit, Fuelband, and MyFitnessPal are just as guilty. But where they are ignoring a market, others are taking advantage—like Bellabeat and its Leaf device, which monitors personal health factors including menstruation.
So this addition isn’t only intended to quiet critics. Reproductive health technology and apps have become wildly popular, and Apple’s fitness and health ambitions for iOS and the Apple Watch mean it can’t simply ignore such a major category of the quantifiable human body. Hopefully, details about the update will confirm as much, and some of us can start logging our periods with a native app.