“Health is wealth”, in this fast-moving world, people realize the importance of health, and they are leveraging the power of technology to their advantage.
Today people are opting for the digital route with mobile apps to keep themselves fit and healthy. There is a wide range of health & fitness apps that allows its user to learn how to exercise, what to eat, and motivating them to workout and eat the right food to stay fit & healthy. Mobile apps are putting more and more people on the path of a fitter and healthier life.
According to an estimate, the fitness industry size is around 20.4 billion USD including apps and wearables. Another heartening fact is that it is growing every year without a break since 2008.
The fitness industry is one of the sunrise industries of the new millennium. As more and more people become health-conscious, they are adopting new ways and methods to improve their fitness. This has prompted a race amongst entrepreneurs in the genre of fitness app development. If you are one of those entrepreneurs who have this burning question, “How to create a fitness app?” then this article will help you.
Being one of the premier mobile app development companies, we know that multiple factors decide the cost of developing a fitness app. The level of complexity that you desire in your app, the number of third party plugins that you install, and whether you decide to build the app only for mobile or also for wearables like Fitbit and Garmin.
You should also calculate the hosting of the fitness app development cost, the cost of publishing it on the app stores, and also the cost of updating and maintaining the app while planning the budget for your fitness app.
Also, you need to decide whether you want to build a Native or a Hybrid app. Native apps are platform dependant, meaning that an app built to run on Android will run only on Android while and app designed to run on iOS will run only on iOS. While Hybrid apps built using frameworks and SDKs like React Native and Flutter are cross-platform apps, meaning that you can build an app that works on devices across various operating systems.
The fitness app development cost also depends upon the country in which your app development company is situated. If the company is located in a developing country like Ukraine or India, then the cost of developing the app will be significantly lower as compared to a company that is situated in developed nations like the USA or Australia.
It is a well-known fact that the cost of developing a mobile app in the USA is around three to four times higher than how much it would cost in a developing country. This is because the developing country has more high-skilled workers who are willing to work at a much lower pay rate than their US counterparts.
You should consider all the above factors and discuss it with a fitness app development company to finalize the quotation.
If you want to build a basic fitness app with features like sign-in/sign up, payment integration, workout log, social integration, geolocation, ratings, and review management and search and filter the exercises, then it will cost you anywhere between $16,000-30,000. While a more advanced fitness app with high-end features and functionalities with those advanced tracking systems integrated will cost you about $85,000 to $1,30,000.
Different Types of Health and Fitness Apps
There are many varieties of fitness apps present in the market today. Hence, you will need to decide the kind of fitness app that you want to build. Here are some fitness app ideas on which you can bifurcate your fitness app.
Fitness Tracking / Workout apps
Based on usage, workout apps can be further divided into the following categories
🔹 Altruistic apps
In these apps the app pays users to register their workouts in exchange for reward points. Once sufficient reward points are accumulated, the user can then convert these points and donate them to his/her favorite charity.
A good example of Altruistic apps is the Charity Miles app which donates money proportional to the miles that you have run, walked or cycled. The idea is to distract the fitness enthusiast from the physically exhaustive task of training to something good. It is a proven fact that such kinds of distractions work in getting people motivated for continuing training.
🔹 Competitive fitness apps
Competitive fitness apps are those apps that allow different users to compete with each other. These apps are successful due to the innate tendency of humans to compete.
Exercise is an app that has this feature. It allows users to compete with each other.
🔹 Customized workout training apps
These apps aid the user in finishing his / her work out in the gym or at home. Many workout apps let the users build their customized training plans, and they also allow them to learn the correct way of doing a workout from their favorite fitness trainers. Before you create a workout app, you will need to consider integrating it with fitness tracking equipment.
Most of the modern fitness apps today come with features that let the user sync the app with his / her fitness tracker. This allows the user to maintain a track record of the progress made.
The Nike training club is an excellent example of a workout application. The app provides audio and video demonstrations for exercises. It also provides the option of choosing the workout type(strength, endurance, flexibility)based on the user’s preference. These tracking fitness apps are one of the earliest kinds of fitness apps to have surfaced in the market.
Diet and nutrition apps
Maintaining a food journal has proven to be beneficial in achieving the goal of weight loss or proper weight gain. Many nutrition and diet tracking apps have come up in the market, which allows the user to keep track of their daily calorie intake. Many advanced apps also enable the user to track their water balance and other macronutrients (carbohydrates and proteins) intakes.
Then there are dietary recommendation apps. These mobile apps recommend the best diet plan according to the lifestyle of the user.
My diet coach is a very popular diet and nutrition planner.
Personal trainer apps
These apps are for personal trainers or large gym chains for their customers. As these apps are Custom Fitness App, a high level of customization is possible with this kind of apps. Using the app, the gym or the user can also plan or cancel the training and tweak other features of the training plan.
Certain apps also allow for live streaming so that the personal trainer can keep track of the training schedule of the user.
The following are the monetization options for a fitness app.
In-app purchases
You can offer multiple in-app purchases like specialized diet plans, paid personalized video fitness lessons to your users. Fitness enthusiasts won’t mind paying for fast-tracking their fitness development.
Advertisements
Many companies are ready to pay for advertising on a successful mobile app. The key here is not to annoy your users with too many ads. Also, understand that you must keep the advertising relevant.
Membership model
Certain apps have a membership model, in which the users need to pay a monthly or yearly fee to avail the features of the app. You can think of this monetization model in an app where professional fitness trainers provide video lessons to the users.
Affiliate sales
You can tie up with various reputed fitness brands and help them in selling their merchandise to your users. While doing so, ensure that you tie up with only those brands that are in-sync with your way of doing business.
Basic and Advanced Features of Fitness Apps
Once you have decided on the kind of fitness app that you want to make, then you shall zero in on the basic as well as advanced features.
Basic features for a fitness app
You need the following essential features.
🔹 Sign up / sign in (include social sign-in option)
🔹 Entering workout details
🔹 Integration through social networks
🔹 Push notifications (for staying motivated and for the app to send you important notifications)
🔹 Geolocation(for running and other outdoor fitness apps)
🔹 Goal Setting
🔹 Activity tracking
🔹 Food logging(for diet apps)
🔹 Barcode scanner (for diet apps)
🔹 Payment integration
🔹 Online consultation and chat option
Advanced features for a fitness app
🔹 Tracking different physical, vital signs of the user
Today, there are many fitness trackers like Fitbit and coming that allows the users to track their progress. Hence your app should be able to integrate with these fitness trackers so that it can help the user in counting the number of steps or monitoring the pulse and even the quality of sleep. Your app would be able to engage with the users in a much better manner if it can track their fitness goals. By integrating the above-mentioned feature in your app, you will be able to do so.
🔹 Video tutorials
You can think of integrating live streaming and video tutorials in your app full show a vital part of the workout is ensuring that the exercise is conducted correctly. Because incorrectly performed exercises can result in injuries. To ensure that your users can go about their fitness routine without any hassle, you can provide them with video tutorials. In these tutorials, physical trainers can show the correct way of doing a particular exercise.
🔹 Gaming element
We humans just love games! Hence many fitness apps have come up with a gaming element in their apps. Your user engagement levels will go through the roof if you can successfully gamify your app. You can think of putting conditional levels of progress for the user. When the user completes a particular level successfully, he/she gets certain reward points. This is just one of the possibilities; you can use your imagination to gamify your fitness app and increase the engagement levels of your users phenomenally.
🔹 Community integration
By integrating your fitness app with various social networks like Facebook, Twitter Instagram, you will be able to provide your users with a medium to brag about their achievements. Users who have successfully completed a specific fitness goal can post their pictures on social media sites. You can also provide the users of your app a fitness platform where they can help in keeping each other motivated.
How to Make a Fitness App? Step to Follow
If you have a great app idea and are perplexed about where to start with the app development process, here are a few steps to get you started with your fitness application:
Step 1. Do Competitive Market Research
An elaborate analysis of the market is crucial for fitness app development as that will give you valuable insights about your competitors and an overview of their strengths, weaknesses and strategies. While doing the market research, you need to form a clear answer to the following questions:
Does your fitness app provide value?
What is the primary purpose of your fitness app?
Do you know what your target audience wants from a fitness app?
How will your fitness app stand out in the crowd?
Do you have a competition? From whom?
How are you going to monetize your application?
This would help you not only in not repeating the same mistakes again but also to be careful in your dealings. A comprehensive market research process will enable you to clearly identify your target users and define what will create real value for them. It will also guide you to set goals and align them with your customers.
Step 2. Hire an Experienced Development Team
When it comes to hiring a dedicated developers team for your fitness application, you have two primary options, one is assembling an in-house developers team and the other is to put your faith in a qualified outsourcing company. Assembling an in-house dedicated developer team for your fitness app development is quite expensive.
Compared to hiring in-house developers, with an experienced mobile app development company you get a solid development team as well as great design talent. It is a budget-friendly option if you want a high-quality application with robust functionalities. Moreover, it gives you flexibility and opens door to a larger talent pool of developers in various fields helping you solve all your pain points feasibly.
Step 3. Don’t Skip the Discovery Phase
The discovery phase of the mobile app development process can be considered the key to the success of your fitness app. It involves analyzing your project requirements and figuring out ways for further development. Here are the basic components of the discovery phase:
Requirement analysis: Analytics help you track downloads, user engagement and retention for your mobile app.
Specifications: Comprehensive attestation of the technologies and features integrated in the app including their correlation with one another.
Representing wireframes: The schematic representation of the future interface. Here, the designers play a vital role in arranging elements of the fitness apps including forms, buttons and links.
Quality assurance: After representing the wireframes and specifications, QA analysts will need to approve them to avoid any rational blunders.
Cost estimation: Documentation of the ultimate cost and time to develop a fitness app based on your goals.
Step 4. Developing a fitness application
If you are perplexed by the gruesome app development process, you can simply follow the four steps and build a successful fitness app. When developing a fitness application, the entire development process is segregated into different phases to make the process more smooth.
Each part of the structured process may take two to three weeks for developers to work on the features and functionalities of the application. Following this pattern lends you an error-free fitness app and a hassle-free development process.
Technology stack for Fitness App
For programming the application, you can use languages like Java, C, and HTML5.
For cloud services, the developers can use Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer, or Google cloud.
Fastly can be used for content delivery and Runcscope for testing and debugging the APIs.
Using the Apple push notifications and Twillo, the developers can integrate push notifications in your app
Plugins for social media sign-up can be used to implement the feature of social sign-in into your app
For database management, you can utilize systems like Atlas-DB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
App Development Team required for Fitness App
The mobile app development team is an important aspect of your fitness app development. It would be better to know about the individual’s expertise. An ideal team for developing a fitness app would include
Project Managers
Team Managers
Technical Experts
Business Analysts
UI & UX Designers
Frontend and Backend Developers
Quality Analysts
Why should you give your fitness app development project to an expert app development company?
Although it is perfectly possible to hire an in-house team of designers and developers to build your fitness app, we advise you to hire the entire setup instead. You can employ professional app development companies who will take care of everything right from the planning stage to the testing and maintenance stage.
Having such professionals on your side will help you in building a game-changing fitness app that will leave your competitors in the dust. At Prismetric, we take pride in being counted as one of the finest mobile app development companies in the industry. Our team has plenty of experience in building Android, iOS, as well as cross-platform apps.
Pragnesh Modh
With a deep interest in new technologies, analyzing mobile application trends and impressive technical concoctions keep him inquisitive. In addition to managing the Operations and Delivery of projects at Prismetric, he likes to read and write a lot about the latest in technology. New app technologies, gadget fascinations, and big technology announcements kindle the writer in him spontaneously. His articles are his passion for innovative technologies.
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