The Time Is Right for Apple to Buy Jawbone

Apple’s Health app is natively installed on every iPhone sold. It’s sandwiched between Cupertino’s News and Settings apps. If you’re an Apple Watch owner, you glance at the Health app every day. Thanks to Apple’s HealthKit API, third-party applications and tracking devices can post and read health data from the same location.

Jawbone is just one of the companies that offer a vastly superior health and wellness app. The company’s UP app tracks sleep, activities, and diet. A Smart Coach helps you make better choices through a series of daily, personalized tips. Best of all: you don’t need a Jawbone fitness device to use most of the app’s most valuable tools. Jawbone UP also works across multiple platforms.

Apple’s Health app, meanwhile, has gone through a series of modest changes since first being introduced in iOS 8 in 2014. In iOS 9.3, for example, Apple had made it easier to find third-party apps to track your health and wellness. The app’s dashboard has also evolved and is now much easier to read.

Unfortunately, the app still lacks in major areas. There’s no way to track exercise goals, and motivation tools are nonexistent. A social network is also missing.

Don’t have iPhone? You can’t use the Health app.

Buying Jawbone would help Apple in many critical areas. First, is the UP app, of course. With full Jawbone integration, Apple Watch users would gain useful tools that have been missing. It could also help bring Apple Watch to Android users.

Second, don’t forget what owning Jawbone fitness trackers would mean for Apple. Not everyone wants to own a smartwatch, which is one of the reasons companies such as Jawbone and Fitness remain popular.

For as little as $50, you can join the Jawbone community. For $130, you can purchase a fitness tracker from design entrepreneur Yves Béhar.

There’s one final reason a Jawbone purchase makes sense for Apple: it would eliminate a Beats competitor. Before fitness trackers, Jawbone was known for its wireless speakers, including the Jambox, Big Jambox, and mini Jambox.

Bye-bye, Jambox.

Earlier this month, Wareable published an interesting article, “It’s all quiet on the Jawbone front.” In the post, the site wonders what the future holds for Jawbone, which has been eerily quiet on the new product front in 2016.

Couple this with word from The Financial Times that Jawbone’s financial picture is becoming bleak.

Have the stars already aligned, Apple?