What you need to know
- Apple reportedly considered a new service similar to Instacart.
- It's thought that nutritional information would have been automatically added to the Health app.
- It now seems unlikely the service will launch.
Apple reportedly considered some sort of service that would be similar to Instacart which would tie into the Health apps on iPhones.
Writing via the weekly Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple explored a feature and service combination that could allow people to order groceries online and have some information automatically populate within the Health app. Little else is known, however, and it appears unlikely that Apple is pursuing it currently.
Gurman was writing in response to a question about what future services Apple could launch. Apple already has so many services that it has a bundle that can save people money in the form of Apple One. But more are likely to be on the way.
There are a few new Apple services in development. The next two we should see: the iPhone hardware subscription program and "buy now, pay later" for Apple Pay transactions. The company has also explored some Instacart-like service that integrates with nutrition data in the Health app. That's probably a doozy to pull off and sounds fairly low-margin. I'm also hoping for some bigger upgrades to TV+.
We know that Apple developers hardware that never ships and patents everything that its engineers come up with, so it's no surprise that there would be services ideas that never come to fruition as well. Still, this one in particular is interesting because it's another example of a physical service linking with software — something similar to Apple Card, for example.
