Apple to make Digital Health push
Augmented reality also expected to be featured at conference
Apple executives will take the stage Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose to lay out the iPhone maker’s software strategy for the next year and tease future hardware ambitions.
Each year when it upgrades the operating systems that power the iPhone and iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, the Cupertino company touts enhancements that tie people ever closer to their devices and keep them engrossed in the latest apps and games.
This year, it will highlight the opposite: using gadgets less.
Apple engineers have been working on an initiative dubbed Digital Health, a series of tools to help users monitor how much time they spend on their devices and inside of certain applications. These details will be bundled into a menu inside of the Settings
app in iOS 12, the likely name of Apple’s refreshed mobile operating system, according to people familiar with the plans.
“We need to have tools and data to allow us to understand how we consume digital media,” Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple executive who worked on the original iPhone and iPod, said in a recent interview. “We need to get finergrain language and start to understand that an iPhone is just a refrigerator, it’s not the addiction.”
This year Apple investors Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System criticized the addictive nature of Apple’s devices. Apple responded by saying it would add more “robust” parental controls to monitor the use of its products.
Rising concern about smartphone addiction is less of a threat to Apple than other big tech companies. Apple makes most of its money selling hardware, and the Digital Health software upgrades likely will give users another reason to keep buying the company’s new devices.
At its own developer conference in May, Google emphasized similar tools. The company has a new Dashboard for Android phones that lets users monitor how long they’re using other apps and reminds people to take a break.
Most of this year’s WWDC will still be devoted to making users want to pick up Apple gadgets. The company plans to show off its prowess in augmented reality by upgrading relatively new tools for iPhones and iPads. AR imposes 3-D digital images on people’s view of the real world. CEO Tim Cook sees the technology as potentially revolutionary as the smartphone.
As part of new software called “ARKit 2.0” internally, the company has been planning a new mode that would let users play AR games against each other in the same virtual environment. Another mode allows objects to be dropped into an area and virtually remain in place. The features will be a prelude of what’s to come from an Apple AR headset planned for as early as 2020.
Otherwise, upgrades to this year’s software will be more muted. There’ll be minor new features for snoozing notifications, tracking the stock market, making video calls and sending Animojis — the virtual cartoons introduced with the iPhone X. This year, Apple executives decided to postpone iPhone and iPad software changes — including a redesigned Home Screen for launching apps and presenting snippets of information, an artificial intelligence upgrade to the Photos app, and new file-management tools for iPads — until next year to improve the quality and responsiveness of this year’s upgrade.
The iPhone and iPad are the top mobile platforms for developers to make money from apps. In the first quarter of this year, consumers spent 85 percent more on iOS apps than Android programs, according to mobile data-analytics firm App Annie. But Apple’s other platforms — the Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV — have become less attractive to developers, and Apple has the opportunity to turn that around.