With an onslaught of wearables & fitness services, health apps are going to be front and center in 2014. Growth in health & fitness apps is staggering & mobile incumbents with small and nimble firms are taking on big publicly traded companies. Health is so popular that every firm from Apple to Bing (I know Bing from Microsoft) is venturing into it.
Mobile rewards apps & services that do “one thing” and one thing extremely well! Very few aggregator services have done well on mobile.
Aka each of the use cases are being broken into simpler apps like Instagram (Camera) & Whatsapp(Address book). The same thing happened with Craigslist over the many years.
The form factor, sparse attention and the reach of mobile can be attributed to acceleration of this trend. The upside on mobile however is that an average user is looking at her phone about 150 times a day.
The current market leaders in the health apps (MyFitnessPal, MapMyRun, LoseIt) have all seen phenomenal growth over the last couple of years! Just take a look at this report from Citrix
If you look closely they are starting to seem like Facebook’s (circa 2012) in the health apps space.
Most apps successful apps currently track nutrition (Logging) & fitness (Wearables) and provide some basic reporting in the name of progress. Even the likes of Samsung do the same. Aka one app that rules the is an aggregator of all the information for health.
However an interesting trend is starting to emerge in the mHealth space as well. Unbundling!
Take a look at two new companies that have taken simple use cases and are trying to build businesses.
- Fitstar — which is focussed on building a personal training app. Think fitness & workout DVDs built for mobile.
- Rise — A nutrition market place where you are paired up with a nutritionist.
Neither of these apps have umpteen use cases! While its really early to tell if they end up building promising businesses, the trend lines are looking good. Fitstar for sure has gotten good traction thanks to Apple’s promotion within the App Store!
Now imaging a suite of mobile health apps that are focussed on nutrition, fitness, mental health, habits & more. You will start to realize that there are big voids that are waiting to be filled in this space. I for one am excited about the prospects of this unbundling.
2014-15 promises to be an exciting time to be in the health tech space.
Two interesting pieces of data that I found interesting
Google Ventures is all over this space, they are behind both of the companies mentioned above.
Looks like some of the market leaders have already taken note of this trend — MyFitnessPal bought Sessions.
