For almost a year, we’ve been hearing about the Mulberry project: Apple’s AI-powered health coach. In February, it was reported that these efforts had been scaled back. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the features should still be on track for iOS 27, although they may not be released until later in the cycle.
On the other hand, Apple will apparently significantly improve the Apple Watch’s heart rate tracking with watchOS 27, which could dovetail well with Apple’s eventual Health Coach.
Improved heart rate tracking
This weekend’s Power On newsletter offers few details on how the Apple Watch’s heart rate tracking will be improved, but here’s what Gurman had to say:
This year’s watchOS 27 update will largely focus on stability, performance, and minor improvements, rather than introducing major new features. However, improvements to heart rate tracking are coming.
As someone who uses both an Apple Watch and WHOOP, I certainly find its heart rate tracking to be more accurate, largely because it updates more consistently, thus providing more granular information. It would be nice to see Apple improve in this regard, although I would say that Apple’s biggest flaw is not the data collection, but the interface.
Mulberry Project Delays
We first heard about Project Mulberry this time last year, an AI agent that would provide health insights based on your Apple Health data. Users could also share their camera feed with the agent and could be used to provide pointers while a user trains.
This feature was originally supposed to roll out with a redesigned Health app in iOS 26.4, but has since been pushed back to iOS 27 as the team scaled back its efforts. Now it looks like this may be delayed even further into the iOS 27 release cycle:
An internal project, an ambitious AI health coaching service known as Mulberry, was recently scaled back after Cue took over Apple’s health group. I don’t expect features from this initiative to launch until later in the iOS 27 update cycle.
It’s still very possible that the redesigned Health app itself will still debut in iOS 27, but Apple’s AI Health Coach (and subsequent Apple Health+ subscription) are apparently being delayed until some time later in the release cycle. It could be iOS 27.1 in October, iOS 27.4 next spring, or somewhere in between.
Apple’s decision to take a break earlier this year was largely because the company felt its offering wasn’t quite competitive with other Health plans on the market and wanted to take more time to get the product right.
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