Apple's New Health Tracking App Forgets That Periods Exist

By Erin Gloria Ryan  |  September 26, 2014 | 4:40pm
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In recent months, Apple has given iTunes users a U2 album and health nuts a revamped HealthKit app that tracks just about everything about a person’s health except menstruation. Apple loves Bono and refuses to acknowledge periods. Apple is literally your dad.

The Verge’s Arielle Duhaime-Ross thinks that this oversight or omission might be due to the fact that the people behind Apple are overwhelmingly white and male and likely don’t spend a quarter of their sexual maturity bleeding from the same place they have sex in. But that’s kind of a shitty excuse, since they allegedly conferred with doctors in putting the app together. She writes,

Apple undoubtedly spoke to a number of physicians when it created its app — the company has boasted of its partnership with the Mayo Clinic, for instance — and it still failed to include what is arguably one of the most basic metrics of human existence.

As it stands, women have other options for tracking their periods with their smartphones. I use one called Period Tracker, which my boyfriend’s 10-year-old nephew once attempted to “play” when he seized my smartphone from the kitchen counter last Thanksgiving. “This is a boring game,” he said, before telling Period Tracker that I’d been experiencing saltiness cravings and a heavy flow.

Another app, called Clue, allows women to track their fertility cycles and has developed an update that will integrate partially with HealthKit, but it only works with a couple of metrics.

Apple ignoring menstruation won’t make it go away. If it did, we’d have eliminated periods long ago.

Image via Apple

 
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