
What it is: Apple recently acquired Tueo Health, a startup focusing on an app for dealign with asthma.
Tueo Health is a startup that was developing an app to help parents monitor asthma symptoms in sleeping children. The app works with commercial breathing sensors that can send an alert to a parent if a child’s breathing changes in the night.
Now the big question is what will Apple do with this acquisition? Will they continue selling this device or will they incorporate it into a new product in the future? Perhaps Apple might just be interested in the people behind the company and not the actual product itself.
Whatever happens, it’s clear that Apple is aiming for the real-time health monitoring market. While Google makes its money from Android through tracking users’ activities, Apple is focusing on privacy, and nothing requires more privacy than personal health data.
That’s going to be the growing difference between Google and Apple. Android’s entire business model revolves around lack of privacy, which makes it hard for people to trust Android for collecting their health data.
Apple’s iOS business model revolves around privacy, which makes it easy for people to trust Apple for collecting and storing their health data. The future of the mobile and wearable market will boil down to privacy.
If you don’t mind not having privacy, you can exchange your data in return for lower price products. If you do want privacy, then you need to pay for it through products that don’t profit from your personal data.
Apple will never shift to Google’s Android model and Google can’t afford to shift Android to Apple’s model. That means while Google will continue cleaning up by monetizing other people’s data, Apple will slowly make inroads in the health field until they gradually come to dominate, not through superior technology but through the simple act of protecting your privacy as much as possible.
As profitable as Android might be for Google now, it won’t seem so profitable in the future when Apple gobbles up the lucrative health care market all to themselves.