Apple has laid off a small number of Fitness+ employees, most of them on the audio side of the service, according to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman. The cuts landed on the teams behind “Time to Walk” and “Time to Run,” the narrated walking and running programs that launched in 2022. New audio content in those formats is expected to appear less often rather than disappear.
Gurman is explicit that the reductions do not mean Fitness+ is being killed. He also reports that people inside the Fitness+ organization see the cuts as the start of more serious cost control, and that Apple may eventually fold the service more tightly into a revamped Health app. Health already received a major overhaul in the iOS 27 cycle. That would match a longer-running internal review of Fitness+, which Gurman has previously described as one of Apple’s weaker subscription products, with high churn and limited revenue.
The scale matters. This is not a company-wide purge. Gurman characterizes the cuts as a handful of roles. Separate reporting notes that Apple is still advertising dozens of fitness-related jobs in Cupertino, a reminder that a small reduction in one production pipeline is not the same as shutting the service down. The more plausible reading is a shift away from niche audio programming and toward a Health-centered fitness product that is cheaper to run and easier to bundle.
MacDailyNews Take: A lot of Fitness+ is relatively expensive and is likely less used than expected. Recalibration is an ongoing process in a healthy segment.
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