Apple starts cutting Fitness+, and nobody thinks it stops here

Apple has laid off a small group of employees working on Apple Fitness+, according to a Bloomberg report published Monday, and the people still there do not read it as housekeeping.

The cuts hit the audio side of the service — the team behind guided sessions such as Time to Walk and Time to Run. New installments are not disappearing, per the report, but they will "drop in frequency." Inside the Fitness+ organization the layoffs are described as the beginning of more drastic cost-cutting and broader changes to the service over the coming months and years.

The service is not being killed, at least not yet. But the logic of cutting it is uncomfortably clean: original fitness content is expensive to produce, the demand for new classes never stops, and subscription churn in the category is brutal. That combination makes Fitness+ an easy line to trim whenever Apple goes looking, and the trimming has now started.

Leadership of Fitness+ shifted last year to services chief Eddy Cue and health boss Sumbul Desai, after reporting that its future was under review. Cue has reportedly pushed Apple to move faster and compete harder in health and fitness — a mandate that argues for folding the service into the company's revamped Health app rather than running it as a standalone content studio.

That would be the tell. Fitness+ launched as a streaming product built to sell hardware, and it has spent five years competing with Peloton and a long tail of app-based trainers on their terms. Apple's actual advantage in health is sensors and data, not instructors, and the company has been buying and shipping accordingly.

For the fitness industry, a shrinking Fitness+ is less a vacancy than a signal. The most patient balance sheet in consumer technology just decided that producing workout content is the part of the business worth cutting first.

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →