Apple hires Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll to direct work on health software

Doll quietly started his new role with Apple last month, according to a LinkedIn profile update discovered by Bloomberg. Little is known about his new position, but Doll previously worked as a software engineer with Apple between 2003 and 2009, helping to develop iOS.

Apple has increasingly turned its attention — and hiring — towards health- and fitness-related products, launching not the just the Apple Watch but HealthKit, ResearchKit, and CareKit. In a recent interview, CEO Tim Cook once again suggested that this is just the beginning.

"We've gotten into the health arena and we started looking at wellness, that took us to pulling a string to thinking about research, pulling that string a little further took us to some patient-care stuff, and that pulled a string that's taking us into some other stuff," he said.

It's not clear how Doll might fit into that picture beyond his general experience in iOS development, but Flipboard is a magazine-style news aggregator that launched in 2010, and was famously one of the first major iPad-only apps, though it would later come to other platforms like the iPhone. In recent months the app's thunder has been undermined by Apple News, which copies many of the same concepts but comes built into iOS 9.

Doll actually left Flipboard in September last year, along with several other executives. In the meantime he's held a position with Redpoint Ventures.