Bloomberg reports that Apple recently scaled back its plans for the Project Mulberry initiative following a leadership change in the company’s healthcare organization. Here are the details.
Last year, Bloomberg announced that Apple is considering Project Mulberry, an initiative that would bring an AI health coach to a redesigned Health app.
According to the original report, this AI agent was trained on data from doctors hired by Apple and would rely on sleep experts, nutritionists, physical therapists, mental health experts and cardiologists to create educational video content for the Health app.
Apple has reportedly built a studio in Oakland, California to produce this content, which Bloomberg notes “will be redesigned and introduced as early as this year.”
From my coverage of the Mulberry 9to5Mac project:
These videos will be played to help explain health trends to users and will be recorded at the new facility in Oakland, California, according to Gurman. Apple also wants to find a “major medical personality” to serve as the “host” of the new service. Some inside Apple call the service “Health+.”
Since then, the project (which was supposed to be unveiled alongside iOS 26) has seen several shifts in the timeline as Apple’s own healthcare and AI divisions have undergone several organizational changes.
On the health side, longtime COO Jeff Williams has retired and oversight of the health and fitness teams has been transferred to head of services Eddy Cue.
Meanwhile, on the AI side, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannandrea has announced that he will step down and retire in the spring of 2026, with much of his organization folded into a broader software engineering group overseen by Craig Federighi.
Fast forward to today, Bloomberg states that Eddy Cue was not convinced that the company’s plans for a new health service were compelling enough compared to what was currently available from competing companies:
Cue told colleagues that Apple needed to move faster and be more competitive in health, the people said. He added that newer competitors – including Oura Health Oy and Whoop Inc. – offer more compelling and useful features, especially through their iPhone apps.
A longtime Apple executive didn’t think the company’s current plan for a new health service met that bar. It is also considering changes to Apple Fitness+, a competitor to Peloton Interactive Inc.’s app that offers guided workouts for $9.99 a month.
Bloomberg also notes that despite the change in plans for Project Mulberry, Apple is still trying to gradually roll out some of its planned features individually within the Health app (including one that would use the iPhone’s camera to analyze how a person walks):
As part of other health efforts, Apple is working on an AI chatbot that would allow users to ask questions about their well-being. It’s based on an in-house system known as World Knowledge Answers — a technology designed to compete with search results and apps like Google Gemini’s Perplexity.
Finally, Bloomberg notes that with iOS 27, Apple plans to enable an improved Siri to “support more advanced health queries in the Health app and its operating systems.”
To read the full Bloomberg report, click this link.
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