“Apple Inc.’s big move into health care, dubbed HealthKit, has surprised a smaller health-focused startup in Australia that uses the same name,” Benjamin Pimentel reports for MarketWatch.
“Apple’s HealthKit, which is geared to helping developers come up with a new generation of health-focused apps, has generated a lot of excitement, especially among health professionals,” Pimentel reports. “But as news of Apple’s rollout at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco spread across the world, the tech giant’s health-care push left a health-informatics firm stunned.”
“‘I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and turned to my Apple iPhone to check my emails,’ a HealthKit executive said in a blog post. ‘Someone had emailed me to ask whether Apple stomped all over your name or did we do a secret deal with them. Huh?!’ The blog post continued: “Apple liked our HealthKit idea so much that they have used our name and launched a new product called HealthKit,'” Pimentel reports. “But the company executive added: ‘HealthKit is already in use, by us! … As an Apple fan, I feel let down. … Are they so big that they are above doing an ordinary Google search?'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The desperate publicity seeking stunt loses whatever zing it’s intended to have when it’s pointed out that Apple’s “HealthKit” is really a suite of developer tools for integrating health data into apps, not a “product” per se.
Apple’s HealthKit is a framework, not a product.
The closest thing (so far) to an announced health-related “product” from Apple, is their forthcoming holistic data-gathering app, free with iOS 8 (also free), that’s called, simply, “Health.”