Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Apple cuts the handful of people who make Time to Walk and Time to Run
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman ties a small Fitness+ layoff to a gradual merger of Fitness+ into the Health app. The revamped Health app in the iOS 27.2 beta is the one piece of that plan anyone outside Apple can open.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported a round of layoffs at Apple Fitness+ affecting a handful of employees, many of them working on the service's guided workouts.
- The affected teams are the ones behind Time to Walk and Time to Run, the motivation-oriented audio coaching part of Fitness+.
- Gurman described the cut as part of a gradual shift and said more Fitness+ layoffs may follow as part of an eventual merger of Health and Fitness+.
- The Health app itself was just given a large revamp in the iOS 27.2 beta.
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Why it matters
- decision Anyone whose roadmap treats Fitness+ as a durable separate surface now has to plan for the version where it is a section of Health, and make that call before Apple confirms either outcome.
- cost The staff cut here make episodes, work that bills every month. That is the cheapest kind of Fitness+ spending for Apple to stop.
- constraint No usage data is in the public record, so the cut is not evidence that beginner audio coaching failed. That limits what competitors can conclude about demand in that segment.
- precedent This consolidation is arriving through reporting, and Apple has not announced it. That sets the working assumption for the next iOS cycle: standalone Apple health features are candidates for absorption into Health.
The person Time to Run was built for opens a running app in the first week of January. Apple announced the feature days after New Year's Day in 2022 [3] and described it as "an audio running experience designed to help users become more consistent and better runners, featuring popular running routes in some of the most notable cities" [4]. The launch was pegged to resolution season, and Gizmodo described the program as aimed at people just getting into exercise [15].
An audio series costs people every month. Someone picks the route and records the narration, an editor cuts the episode, and then it happens again. Gurman said many of the handful of employees affected work on those guided workouts [1].
The published account gives no usage figures for either series [9]. The cut cannot tell you how many subscribers came back for a second episode. Its writer guessed that the friendly guided runs suited beginners while serious users had already moved to harder programs and devices such as Whoop and Garmin, and said plainly, "I don't use any of these apps" [10].
Gurman is the source for every step of the consolidation story [12]. In February, Gurman reported that Eddy Cue, Apple's new head of services, uses competitor health devices and wants "broader changes to the health strategy" [5]. Apple then revised a plan for an AI-powered virtual health coach codenamed Mulberry, and Gurman said ideas from Mulberry would be integrated into Health [6]. Apple also tends to avoid huge, headline-grabbing rounds of job cuts [11], and this round is described as bolstering rumors of consolidation, something Apple itself has not announced [16].
Two distinctions do the work for a team shipping into Apple's health stack. One is whether a thing is a surface of its own or content rendered inside someone else's surface. The other is whether it needs staff every month or ships once and then gets maintained. Time to Walk and Time to Run were the expensive combination: content with a recurring production bill, inside an app Gurman says may be folded into another app [7]. Any plan for the next two quarters that assumes Fitness+ keeps its own icon and its own tabs is resting on an assumption I would test.
Gizmodo put the end state as a question of space: if Fitness+ or something that evolves from it lives entirely within Health, "perhaps there's just no more room for beginner audio guides for the New Year's resolution crowd" [14].
What to watch
- Whether a later iOS 27 point release puts Fitness+ content inside the Health app or leaves the separate app in place.
- Further Fitness+ layoffs, which Gurman said may be coming as the two apps converge.
- Whether Apple keeps charging for Fitness+ content once that content lives inside Health.