This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 18th, 2023. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Slowly but surely, Apple is moving ever closer to the most intimate thing we have — our bodies and our wellbeing. And in doing so, it is drawing yet another line against competitors such as Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and ByteDance (TikTok).

At Apple’s developer conference WWDC in June this year, the company outlined new features pointing to an ever-greater focus on an area that fits perfectly with its emphasis on privacy: health.

Walking alongside the Apple Park Pond — a pond located inside the company’s new, saucer-shaped headquarters — health chief Sumbul Ahmad Desai described the new initiatives. “We are moving into two new areas that are always grounded in science with privacy at the core,” she explained, referring to mental health and eye health.

Apple’s new software is designed to help users understand what contributes to their mental wellbeing, and to reduce the risk of myopia — the nearsightedness that affects 30 percent of the population — which can be influenced by spending a lot of time looking at screens. Those with an iPhone can also set it to different focus modes, so the phone does not disturb its owner when working, sleeping, or wanting a break from notifications.

The choice is no coincidence. Apple has selected two areas for which tech companies have previously drawn heavy criticism. The initiative thus becomes a kind of alibi for the responsibility the industry has been accused of shirking.

Mental health data is a particularly sensitive subject — something many people would prefer to share only with loved ones or professional care providers.

Here, Apple — whose multi-year commitment to protecting data and privacy is well established — can stake out a position that is hard for competitors to match. Nobody wants information about their mental state to feed targeted advertising.

Apple’s commitment is not entirely altruistic, however. Having a service where users track their wellbeing is also a way of ensuring they do not switch to a different mobile platform. And one way to prevent myopia is to get plenty of daylight — something Apple measures with its watch. In the presentation, Apple Watch is suggested as ideal for children, to ensure they spend enough time outdoors each day. So now even tech companies want children to go outside and play — provided they have a device on their wrist, of course.

Apple Watch has become the hub for a series of health initiatives in recent years. It can now perform basic ECG tests, measure nighttime body temperature, and track blood oxygen levels.

This makes the watch a kind of medical device that requires regulatory approval before it can be sold — a slow and administratively complex process, for understandable reasons, and not something a tech company would take on if it were not important.

That Apple has chosen to do so anyway says something about its ambitions in this space. Privacy, health, and hardware are converging into a strategy that its competitors — who built their business models on advertising — are structurally ill-placed to follow.