The demand for wellness mobile apps is steadily growing. From this article, you’ll get to know what it takes to create your own one.
By 2026, the global fitness app market is expected to reach $14.7 billion. If you launch your own app now, you should be able to make good money on it. Yet the competition in this sphere is fierce, so you need to release a particularly high-quality product. From this article, you’ll get to know how to approach the process of creating a fitness app for iOS and Android.
Fitness App Types
This is the first thing that the web and mobile app development company will ask you about.
- Workout apps. Over 70% of all wellness apps belong to the workout and weight loss category. Here, users can find text instructions and video tutorials for training sessions. They will be able to work out at home without a trainer.
- Activity tracking. Such apps measure their users’ heart rate, calculate the calories they burn and the steps they make. Ideally, users should connect their smartphones to wearables.
- Nutrition and diet. Apps of this type help users to get rid of excessive weight and improve their silhouette. Also, they’ll be able to restore their water balance and keep to a wholesome diet.
The price of mobile app development services and the time that it will take to build your app might vary considerably depending on the type.
Besides, you might want to create a meditation and relaxation app or the one that analyzes its users’ sleep patterns. Apps of this sort are considered niche products but seem to have good potential.
The Main Features of Fitness Apps
Apart from video tutorials, nutrition plans and record tracking tools, a typical fitness app should offer its users the following features.
- User profile. Here, every user can indicate their age, weight, height and other parameters. They can set goals and track their achievements.
- Social media integration. Users should be able to log in with their social media accounts and share their progress with their friends and family. Social support is a vital prerequisite for training success.
- Wearables connectivity. The app should connect to wearables quickly and easily. The connection should be reliable.
- Push notifications. They can remind users that it’s time to work out, drink water or go to bed. Push notifications are extremely important for customer retention.
- Geolocation. Users will be proud to let others know how frequently they go to the gym. Also, it’s fun to visualize one’s jogging route and share it with friends.
To make your product stand out from the rest, you might want to add extra features to it. It might be, for instance, integration with third-party apps or a barcode scanner that people can use in a grocery shop to check how a certain product fits their nutrition plan. Also, you might create a community and leaderboards to motivate users or invent any other competitive edges for your product. But you should realize that every feature has its price tag. It might be reasonable to start with the basic solutions and add advanced ones as your app begins to generate profit.
How to Select the Best Developers
People who have never launched apps might think that it’s enough to build a product just once and then slightly tweak it so that it becomes compatible with both iOS and Android. But that’s not true because these two operating systems differ too drastically. You’ll need to either build two separate apps from scratch with the help of different teams, each of which specializes respectively in iOS and Android. Otherwise, you might want to find a team that can work with both operating systems.
It’s crucial that the developers whom you hire have experience in developing similar applications. They should have all the necessary tools at their disposal and their rates should be affordable. Customers who have already used their services should leave positive reviews about them. Top teams consist not only of developers but also include designers and QA engineers.
How to Make Your App Profitable
To start earning money on your product, you should analyze the tastes, demands and habits of your target audience. Plus, you should learn about your competitors’ monetization strategies and think of which practices you might want to use too.
There are three main monetization models in this segment:
- Subscription
- Ads
- In-app purchases
Your ultimate choice should depend on whether you launch your app as a stand-alone product or as a supplement to some brand. For instance, you make and sell clothes for fitness. In this case, the app can serve as a tool that will help you to promote your clothes — and you’ll be able to make money on in-app sales. But if your app contains training sessions and is not affiliated with any manufacturer or service provider, you might want to opt for the subscription model.
Before the official release of your app, make sure to carry out A/B testing. It will help you to understand whether the chosen model will indeed bring you income. You should set the KPIs and monitor the results.
To make sure that your product sells successfully in the App Store and Play Market, you should optimize it for these shops. It means that you should fine-tune your app’s metadata to increase its search visibility in the App and Play Store. This process resembles
Last but not least, you should be ready to systematically update your app. You should not only add new content to it but also fix bugs, optimize the code and make sure that your product meets all the rapidly changing technological standards.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, this article came in handy and now you better understand how to approach the process of building a wellness mobile app. Research proves that people become dedicated to their fitness apps once they start using them. So if you deliver a cool product, it should have good odds of taking off!
