Apple Watch iOS 26.4 Kills Garmin Connect+ Food Logging?
Apple plans a major Health app overhaul in iOS 26.4 (Feb-March 2026), adding camera-based food logging, Health+ video content, and AI insights—directly challenging Garmin’s recent nutrition-tracking (food logging) feature and well-established apps like MyFitnessPal.
A New Video Service called Health+
Apple will launch Health+ videos featuring doctors, sleep experts, nutritionists, and cardiologists. This will be similar in approach to Apple’s existing Fitness+ exercise videos but focused on educational guidance.
Where Fitness+ records workouts with data from your Apple Watch, Health+ will instead consider longer-term negative trends, such as poor sleep or high heart rate variability, and recommend specific educational videos. Apple will tread a fine line between being helpful and giving medical advice.
Camera Food Logging
With strangely coincidental timing, Apple will add camera-enabled nutrition logging to its iPhone only weeks after a similar, paid-for feature from Garmin in its Connect+ subscription ecosystem.
Your iPhone’s rear camera analyses meals for calorie/macronutrient tracking, competing with MyFitnessPal and Noom. Apple will need to accurately determine the food and the portion size.
It will be interesting to test Apple’s new service for accuracy. I performed detailed tests on Garmin’s Nutrition tracking, looking at food type recognition (via the camera) and calorie calculations (via a food database). Its AI engine was left wanting on both counts compared to the four main AI models I tested with the same imagery
AI Agent
9to5mac reports that the new camera-enabled features will also extend to looking at the form of your exercise – that could be your running form, or it could be the precision of your yoga positions.
To me, this sounds like an oddly specific feature for Apple to add. How many people will use a camera to monitor their form during exercise? Some…but not many. Perhaps more likely would be looking at Apple Watch running dynamics (power, vertical oscillation, ground contact time) and use that as a prompt for more Fitness+ videos on correctly using your technique via running drills.
iOS 26.4 Timeline
Based on historical trends, Apple will follow this timeline
- Developer Beta 1: Early February 2026 – this is the first public announcement of the features
- Live Release: Late March/early April 2026
Last Updated on 30 January 2026 by the5krunner
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tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors.
