Apple is rolling out an update for the iOS 8 Health app that will temporarily disable manual input of blood sugar levels as the developers work on a patch that will add support to another type of blood glucose measurement used in countries like the U.K. and Australia.
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According to a ticket on Apple's Support page (thanks, CNET), Apple HealthKit supports both commonly used measurements for blood glucose, but users were only able to manually input glucose levels in the measurement used in the U.S., France and Japan (mg/dL), not the official SI unit used in the U.K. and Australia (mmol/L). To make sure diabetics and other users who rely on charting their blood sugar levels don't accidentally receive incorrect readings in SI countries, Apple is working on an update that will let users input their own blood sugar readings into the app using either measurement, whichever one they're used to.
Apple notes that this temporary down time will not affect third party apps that use blood glucose data. They also note that, though users won't be able to view their manually recorded blood glucose data while the temporary update is active, the previous data will still be saved, so users can continue charting when the functionality comes back up.
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Apple Health was introduced as an all-in-one center for iOS 8 users to track their exercise, diet and other health-related data. It interacts with third-party apps via HealthKit, an API that allows users to run their preferred health apps while still taking advantage of all of the data Health collects. Though HealthKit got off to a rocky start thanks to a bug that caused HealthKit apps to disappear from the App Store, the Apple Health ecosystem has been up to more or less full capacity since the iOS 8.0.2 update.
