For most of the last decade, Apple set the pace in consumer health. The Watch, the Health app, ECG, fall detection, the whole quiet pitch that your wrist could keep an eye on you. That lead is no longer obvious. In the span of a few weeks this spring, Google and Samsung both shipped the thing everyone has been waiting for, an AI that actually looks at your numbers and tells you what to do about them, while Apple's version slipped quietly off the calendar. Here is where each of the three actually stands today, without the keynote gloss.
What Google just did, and why it matters
On May 19, 2026, Google renamed the Fitbit app to Google Health and turned on a Gemini-powered health coach as the headline feature. It is a paid feature, bundled into a 9.99 dollar a month or 99 dollar a year Google Health Premium plan, the old Fitbit Premium under a new name. (TechCrunch) The coach is conversational. It reads your sleep, activity, and heart data and you can talk to it about workouts, rest, stress, and nutrition, the way you would text a trainer who happens to have all your numbers in front of them. People already paying for Google's higher AI tiers get it folded in at no extra cost, which is a quiet but aggressive way to put it in a lot of hands fast.
The part that should make Apple uncomfortable is the hardware Google paired with it. Alongside the rebrand, Google launched the Fitbit Air, a roughly 100 dollar screenless band, and crucially it works with iPhones. The Google Health app runs on iOS 16.4 and later and connects to Apple Health, so an iPhone owner can strap on a cheap band, open a Google app, and start talking to an AI coach today. (Android Headlines) Google is not waiting for you to switch phones. It is reaching across the fence into Apple's own platform and offering the feature Apple has not shipped.
What Samsung is shipping, and what is leaking
Samsung is on the same path from a different direction. On June 8, 2026, it began rolling out a redesigned Samsung Health app built around five pillars, activity, mindfulness, nutrition, sleep, and vitals, with new AI features attached. (SamMobile) The centerpiece is Vitals, which learns your personal overnight baseline from five signals, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and blood oxygen, and a Heart Health Score on top of it. The pitch is the same one everyone is now making, move from passive tracking to proactive coaching that knows what normal looks like for you specifically.
The more interesting part is what is still in beta. A feature called Samsung Health Assistant has been spotted in test builds, an on-phone AI you can actually have a conversation with about your health and fitness. (SamMobile) It is not fully public yet, but Samsung is clearly building its own answer to Google's coach, and it is doing it in the open, where everyone can see it is coming. That visibility is itself a kind of pressure.
Sponsored
What happened to Apple's coach
Apple was supposed to be here first. Its AI health coach, known internally as Project Mulberry and floated as a Health+ service, was meant to be the marquee health feature of this generation. Instead it got pulled back. After a leadership change in the health organization, Apple decided the standalone service was not compelling enough against what rivals already offered, and chose to fold pieces of it into the existing Health app over time rather than launch it as one product. (9to5Mac) Reporting now suggests the bigger Mulberry features may not land until later in the iOS 27 cycle, with smaller pieces like nutrition tracking and a scaled-down health agent trickling in earlier.
Read that next to the calendar. Google shipped a paying product in May. Samsung shipped a redesign in June and has a coach in beta. Apple shipped a plan to ship some of it, eventually. For a company whose entire health story was built on being early and trustworthy, that is a real gap, and it is the first time in years the answer to "who has the best health AI" is plainly not Apple.
How far behind is Apple, really?
It is worth being fair about Apple's actual position, because behind on AI coaching is not the same as behind on health. Apple still has the strongest sensor hardware story in the Watch, the deepest medical research partnerships, the ECG and afib history, and a privacy posture that genuinely keeps more of your data on the device. If your worry is where your most sensitive data lives, Apple is still the most conservative of the three. None of that has gone away.
What Apple is missing is the one feature people can feel every day, an assistant that turns the pile of numbers into a sentence you can act on. That is the layer Google and Samsung just shipped and Apple has not. Closing it is not a hardware problem for Apple, it is a software and a willingness problem, and notably, the Gemini deal Apple signed to power the new Siri means the model that could eventually drive an Apple health coach may be the very same Google model already running Google's. To catch up, Apple does not need to invent anything exotic. It needs to ship a coach that is at least as useful as the one a 100 dollar Fitbit already puts on an iPhone, and it needs to do it before "I'll just use Google Health" becomes a habit for its own customers.
The switch that is quietly happening
Here is the dynamic that should worry Apple most. An iPhone owner who wants an AI health coach does not have to leave the iPhone to get one. They buy a cheap Fitbit Air, install Google Health, let it read from Apple Health, and pay Google 9.99 dollars a month. The phone stays Apple. The health relationship, and the subscription, becomes Google's. Once someone's coach, history, and habit live in a Google app, the Apple Watch has to win them back, not just keep them. That is a much harder position than the one Apple is used to being in.
The honest bottom line
Right now, if you want a conversational AI health coach today, Google has the most complete one and it runs on your iPhone, and Samsung is close behind with its own coming into view. Apple has the better hardware and the better privacy story and, for the moment, the emptier promise. None of this is a reason to throw out an Apple Watch you like. It is a reason to watch the iOS 27 cycle closely, because that is where Apple has to prove it can still lead the category it used to own. A recap, not advice, and not medical guidance, talk to a clinician about anything that actually concerns you.
This studio builds health-adjacent apps with a privacy-on-device philosophy, you can see the lineup at jcmobileappstudio.com. The right tracker is the one you will actually use, and the right place for your most personal data is the one you trust most, not the one with the loudest keynote.
— JC Mobile App Studio