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What HealthKit Bug Means For Your iOS Fitness Apps

Apple has delayed the launch of the much talked about HealthKit app, citing a bug.
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Posted at 9:56 AM, Sep 18, 2014

HealthKit has a bug, and not the kind that you can just squish and call it a day. It's the technical kind of bug, and it has delayed the launch of the new service. 

HealthKit — by the way — is a platform for health and fitness apps that basically curates data from those apps so that users and health professionals can see it all in one place. (Video via Apple)

And because it had the potential to be pretty groundbreaking for the healthcare industry — it was a much-anticipated feature of iOS 8. So what the bug means is you don't get to see those third-party apps working with HealthKit until the issue's fixed — which Apple plans to do in an update later this month.

And instead of locking themselves up in their rooms over the delay, tech-writers were having fun with the news. PCWorld said the app got infected, The Guardian said the app caught a bug. 

You know, playing off that "illnesses are also called bugs" thing. Clever. But let's do some real talk here. In all reality, HealthKit was a much-talked about feature; some would say it's one of the biggest features in the release of iOS 8, Apple certainly did.

Now, aside from promising a fix this month, Apple isn't really explaining the last-minute problem. All we know:

WCIV"A bug ... A glitch."

WKTV"Has found a bug."

News 12 Long Island"There is a bug affecting health apps."

OK, we get it. It's broken. iPhone Hacks calls this the third major blow ahead of the release of iOS 8, citing Apple's pulling of the iCloud Photo Library and SMS Continuity.

But let's be real. Thousands of people are still going to download iOS 8 regardless. We all know it ... most of us have already done it. The iPhone 6 goes on sale September 19.