Apple will soon issue a software update that will temporarily remove the ability to track blood glucose levels in iOS 8’s Health app following reports from users in the United Kingdom and Australia that the software is incompatible with standard measurements in these countries, Cnet reported Wednesday evening.
Existing blood glucose data won’t be deleted from users’ devices, said Apple in a support document detailing the issue. “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,” reads the document.
A fix for the issue is being worked on and will be released in due time. Once the patch has been released, the previous blood sugar data will reappear in the Health app.
The issue stems from the differences between measurement standards used in the United States and other countries. A bug that exists in the HealthKit framework currently prevents users in the United Kingdom and Australia from manually entering blood sugar levels taken from an external device using millimoles per litre (mmol/L) measurements used in these and other countries.
This is because Health in iOS 8 only supports blood glucose values in milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) or millimoles per liter (mmol/L).
“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,” according to Apple’s support document.
It was unclear at press time whether blood-tracking features will be removed from the Health app in the iOS 8.0.3 or iOS 8.1 software update.
“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,” cautions the firm. “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”.
[Cnet, Apple Support]