Apple to disable another Health feature as UK and Australian users report blood glucose measurement issues
Apple has decided to disable one of the features of the Health application, specifically the blood glucose tracking capability, until it can issue a fix for issues reported by users in the UK and Australia, CNET reported tonight. The feature will apparently be removed through an incoming software update (perhaps iOS 8.1, or possibly 8.0.3) while the company prepares a patch to remedy the problem. Apple has also provided a longer explanation on its support website:
The Health app lets you manually enter and view blood glucose values in mg/dL (milligrams per deciliter). This unit of measurement is used by a number of countries, while some other countries use mmol/L (millimoles per liter).
HealthKit supports both units of measurement. However, if you measure your blood glucose using a device that displays mmol/L, those values can’t be manually entered or displayed in the Health app with that unit of measurement.
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.
If you have previously entered values manually in the Health app, you’ll no longer see this data in the Health app after the update. However, your data won’t be deleted, and other apps with permission to read health data will still have access to blood glucose values that you previously entered.
Third-party apps will continue to be able to support both units of measurement and can continue to use HealthKit APIs to store blood glucose data.
While it’s true that the HealthKit framework supports measurement standards for both the United States and abroad, a bug that exists in the current version prevents users from manually entering or viewing blood glucose levels using anything other than United States measurements (mg/dL, or milligrams per deciliter) within the actual Health application. The UK and Australian standard is the millimole per litre (mmol/L).