Apple unveils move towards health and home in new iPhone software

Apple has revealed its plans to offer apps to track health data and enable users to have integrated control of 'smart home' devices. Photograph: ZUMA/REX

Blood pressure a little high? Need the lights turned off in your home? There's an app for that. Or there soon could be after Apple unveiled the latest plans for its iPhone software on Monday at its developers' conference in San Francisco.

Chief executive Tim Cook heralded the new software, which will gather and store health-related data and also offer integrated control for "smart home" devices such as remote-controlled light bulbs.

It will be released in the autumn and run on iPhones and iPads, as "something only Apple can do", Cook said, as he pointed to statistics which said that 130m iPhone and iPad buyers in the past 12 months out of about 230m sold were new to Apple's platform.

The "HeallthKit" and "HomeKit" software are part of a concerted effort by the Californian company to position its smartphone as the hub of peoples' digital lives, much as it did more than a decade ago when it first launched its iTunes software for organising music files.

In a speech to thousands of software developers at the Worldwide Developers conference in San Francisco's Moscone West centre, neither Cook nor Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, announced any new hardware for the health or smart home categories. But Carolina Milanesi, analyst at the research firm Kantar ComTech, suggested Apple was aiming to get developers to build apps for both sectors before making its own move into them. "Otherwise you get the Galaxy Gear effect where Samsung announced a $300 smartwatch but there weren't any apps for it, so people say 'what's the use of that?'"

Federighi was at pains to emphasise that the health and smart home systems will not share user data without explicit permission, as it seeks to position itself as an alternative to the datasharing approach used by Google, Facebook and other advertising-supported companies.

However the $3bn purchase of the Beats headphones and music company was not mentioned in the two-hour presentation although Federighi did jokingly make a call to "a new Apple employee" the Beats cofounder Dr Dre, who sent developers his best wishes.

Apple also showed off software called "Handoff" that will allow iPhone owners to answer incoming phone calls or texts on an iPad or Mac computer.

With new smartphone buyers becoming increasingly hard to find as the US and European markets become "saturated", Apple is looking to attract users of Google's Android to use its phones and tablets. Cook put heavy emphasis on the success that the iPhone and iPad have had in China, saying that half of its customers there had switched from Android.

Announcing HealthKit, Federighi said that presently apps retain their data inidvidually but do not interact or connect to make good use of it. "That information lives in silos," he said.

"You can't get a single comprehensive picture."

The news follows archrival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's announcement last week of a mobile healthdata store called SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions).

Samsung plans to market SAMI by hosting a developer challenge and setting aside a $50m fund for earlystage digital health entrepreneurs.

The update to the iPhone and iPad software will be released in the autumn, Federighi said. Though Apple made no mention of new iPhones or iPads, those are expected to be shown off just ahead of the software's release, and to ship just after it.

Among the expected updates are an iPhone with a larger screen to capture users who might otherwise shift to the increasingly popular "phablet" models, and to win back those who have moved away from the iPhone because they have preferred the larger screens available on Android. Presently the iPhone 5S has a 4in screen, measured diagonally, while products like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8 have screens measuring 5in or more, and analyst data shows that such larger screens are increasingly popular.

Apple also showed off new OS X software for its desktop and laptop computers that will automatically connect to an iPhone, so that it will show the identity of a caller, and let them reply to SMSs directly from the screen. Codenamed "Yosemite", it will be available as a public beta so that any Mac user can apply to test it.