Apple fans suffering from diabetes may have to wait a little longer to be able to use their iPhone to measure blood glucose levels, after the company disabled the feature.
The reason was that it was incorrectly displaying the measurements for users who don’t use the USA metrics (mg/dL – milligrams per deciliter). If you’re outside the US, and use a different system (like the UK and Australia, who use millimole per litre – mmol/L), you would be unable to use the measurement standard in that territory.
Obviously, due to the nature of the app, Apple doesn’t want to mess around when it comes to software bugs. If one thing goes wrong it could have terrible effects on a user who mis-medicated due to a few bad lines of code, and the last thing the company would want is a health scandal.
An Apple spokesperson made the following statement
“To prevent confusion in countries where mmol/L is commonly used, we’ll soon release a software update that will temporarily remove the ability to manually enter and view blood glucose values in the Health app while we work on an update to support both units of measurement,”
One thing to note is that when they release the bug-fix, all old data collected through the Health app will appear in the correct format, allowing greater insight into patterns in your health data. Additionally, third-party apps will still be able to access this older data while the feature is disabled, giving you a way to view this important data even before the patch arrives.
So, until they can patch the problem, the iPhone is not able to track blood glucose. Whether the fix will come in iOS 8.1, or if they conjure up 8.0.3 quickly, is yet to be seen.
Regardless, if you’re interested in what HealthKit has to offer, then here are a few general health apps you’ll want to take a look at.