We may earn a commission from links on this page.
Apple announced new watches today—a Series 12 and an Ultra 4—which you can read more about here. But alongside the watch features, Apple announced a revamped Health app. We’ll soon have a proper dashboard for health data and insights, rivaling what you can get from the companion apps for other wearables like Whoop, Garmin, and Fitbit.
Why Apple needed a better health dashboard
Apple was an early trendsetter when it came to health-focused watches, but it quickly fell behind as all the other devices began adding sleep scores, recovery scores, and customized insights based on your day’s data. If you open up a good wearable app, you’ll instantly know what’s going on with your body’s data and what you should probably do about it. I’m often skeptical of the specifics—you shouldn’t read too much into any app’s metrics—but it’s good to have something to look at.
The Apple Health app has existed for years, but it’s mostly a dry listing of data from different sources. Which is a shame, because it has access to an incredible amount of data, not to mention powerful hidden features that most of us never manage to discover.
Last year, Apple finally revamped its Fitness app to match what other wearables give us in terms of activity tracking. This year, we finally get the other half: a Health app that can tell you how well you slept, how “recovered” you are, and how your long-term health seems to be shaping up.
What’s coming to the redesigned Health app
Although Apple showed these features in the context of an Apple Watch upgrade (more on that below), the things that intrigue me most are likely to be software updates that roll out to iPhones in general. That’s my guess, in any case—I’ll watch Apple’s announcements for more details as they become available.
Apple showed a new Readiness score, which can tell you whether you need to “recover,” should “pace yourself,” are “ready,” or should “go for it.” (That’s in order from worst to best.) This score can update during the day, making it a more readable version of something like Garmin’s Body Battery.
When you open your Health app, it looks like relevant “insights” will show up at the top of the screen, including your sleep, recovery, and rings, and the main screen can show your sleep from the past night along with a sleep score. The app includes text summaries and guidance that are generated by Apple Intelligence, suggesting that you’ll need an iPhone 16 or later for these.
In the screenshots Apple shared, I spied a tiny number that is actually a huge change of focus for the company: one of the insights shows your rings next to your step count for the day. Apple has never made a big deal about steps, to the point where people often download third-party step counters to be able to easily view steps on the watch. But the Health app has kept count all along, and now that number is showing up somewhere you can easily see it.
Depending on how well Apple executes this idea, I could see apps like Bevel becoming obsolete. And Bevel already makes some wearables’ apps (like Google Health) obsolete—you can just read the data from Bevel, or now Apple Health, instead of using the app that comes with your Fitbit. Other fitness tech companies will now have a serious competitor that is available for free on customers’ phones.
Longevity and VO2max assessments are another big change
I roll my eyes every time a health or fitness app claims to gauge my “longevity” or some true “age” of my body. Depending on which app you ask, I’m either 10 years younger than I really am, or three years older.
Apple has joined the club, with a whole Longevity tab in the Health app. (That now brings the number of tabs to three: the main screen, the sharing tab, and now longevity in the middle.) Despite the eye-rolling, I see what Apple is doing here. Don’t think of longevity in this (or any) app as being an accurate gauge of how long you will live; think of it as how your long-term health habits are adding up. Apple’s longevity calculations involve seven areas, with icons indicating something like nutrition, exercise, heart health, hearing health, movement (maybe steps), sleep, and mental well-being.
There’s also a new set of assessments, including a VO2max assessment. According to Apple’s presentation, you’ll prop your phone up where it can see your full body, and then you’ll step to a metronome’s beat, speeding up as the beeps speed up until you’re running in place. This sounds like it may have been inspired by the Harvard step test, which has you step up and down in place and then measure your heart rate. Until now, Apple’s VO2max estimates have always been based on GPS-tracked activities like outdoor running. (Apple finished in the middle of the pack when I tested the accuracy of nine devices’ VO2max estimates. I’m curious to see whether the new assessment does better.)
The Apple Watch boasts the “most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable”
When it comes to the full experience—with the Apple Watch itself—there’s a notable upgrade to the Series 12 Apple Watch compared to previous versions. Apple has redesigned the heart rate sensor on the back of the watch, with larger lights and redesigned photodiodes to detect the reflected light.
With these redesigns, Apple says it has the “most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.” To which I say: I’ll believe it when I see it. In my testing over the past few years, Apple Watches have lagged well behind other wearables’ heart rate sensors when I test them for accuracy. I’d certainly believe that it found room for improvement, but is the new Apple sensor really going to be able to beat Garmin’s fifth-generation sensor, the one that made me do a double take because I thought I had it mixed up with my chest strap data?
Apple has released a whitepaper with the results of an internal heart rate accuracy study it did comparing the Series 12 (but not the Ultra 4) against the Garmin Forerunner 970, Google Pixel Watch 4, Huawei Watch 5, Samsung Galaxy Watch 8, Whoop 5.0, and Oura Ring 5, with a Polar H10 chest strap for reference. It’s a short paper, and doesn’t show the kind of detail I would like to see from a thorough test, so you can bet I’ll be investigating this myself once I get my hands on the new watch. If Apple really reaches a Forerunner 970 level of accuracy, I’ll be incredibly impressed.
