How to Build a Meditation App in 2023
The mediation app market is booming. Meditation apps have become an integral part of modern lives and are a fantastic way to cope with anxiety, mental stress, procrastination and unease.
People are tied around smartphones. Most of them even rest with smartphones in their hands. Such unhealthy habits have brought a considerable amount of stress / anxiety people did not face before.
This is one of the reasons why meditation app practitioners have tripled over the last decade and why meditation app revenue is projected to reach $4.64 billion in 2023.
This blog includes how to build a meditation app and what are some of the things to keep in mind while developing one.
Let’s get started!
Decide on Your Business Idea
There are a number of meditation / healthcare apps available out there and each one has its own specialities. Before you develop a successful app, you must decide what exactly you are going to offer your users. Is it unique and useful to attract them? Above all, what’s the niche?
Here are some examples of meditation apps:
- Yoga app
- Breath meditation app
- Morning meditation app
- Live meditation app
- Network meditation app
- Meditation music app
- Mindfulness meditation app
As you see, there can be many types of meditation apps. So before you start off with the app development, have a clear idea of the application.
Pro Tip: You can add some intuitive features to beat your competition and create a better mediation app.
Select the Right Approach to Colour / Design
Meditation apps are used to help people with stress, depression and anxiety. So when you consider developing a meditation app, you need to be careful with design selection.
Each colour evokes a different emotion. Therefore, it is essential to choose a colour that would put a user in the right emotion, either consciously or unconsciously.
While you choose a colour palette for your meditation app, it is important to know your audience as some colours symbolise different emotions in different cultures. For instance, red is generally associated with passion and energy, but in some places, red could mean danger or greed.
The safest and the best way is to pick a meaningful colour for your target audience, instead of going with anything.
Here are some colours recommendations for meditation app design.
- Use a more natural palette of pastel shades instead of bright colours.
- Overloaded patterns or colour designs distract users from their end goal. So do not use too many of them at once.
- Animations work best. You can use them instead of texts for welcome screens and meditation audio & video explainer guides.
- Avoid too many details.
Decide on Mobile App Platform
Your mediation app can be compatible with both Android & iOS. Both Android and iOS are widely used by users across the world. If your budget allows you to go for the development of both, go for it. It totally depends on your budget.
Native Meditation App Development
Each OS has its own specific design, language, IDE (integrated development environment) and guidelines. Native app development means building an app for a specific OS like Android or iOS.
For Android app development, you can use Kotlin, Java and Android Studio. While Objective-C, Swift and Apple Xcode can be used for iOS app development.
Cross-platform Meditation App Development
In simple words, cross-platform app development means developing apps for both (iOS and Android) platforms via a single codebase. That means you do not have to build apps separately for both platforms.
Design
For Android, app designers generally follows Google’s Material Design Guidelines which specify icon spacing, colour palette recommendations, table sizes and many other things. On the other hand, iOS refer to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.
Differences Between iOS and Android Design
Depth and Perception
iOS advocates design that has depth where thin lines and blurred margins float in their own dimension. While Google has a deep love for designs that are stacked on top of each other.
Buttons
iOS buttons are flat with no shadows whereas Android buttons support the upper case function and have shadows.
Animation
Android animations are more vibrant and create a more hands-on user experience. iOS keep animation simple and discrete.
Must-have Features of a Meditation App
Dashboard
Users need a dashboard where they can quickly access important information, save & track their progress, view the history of the latest meditation and so forth. Of course, it should also contain basic information such as login credentials.
Sign Up via Social Media
Signing up with social media (Google, Facebook, Twitter) speed up the signup process and there is no need to remember the password anymore when you’ve decided to build this feature.
Audio / Video Player
In any healthcare app — be it meditation or fitness — users are either guided by live trainers or by recorded sessions. You would need media playback in both cases. Besides, if you want your app to offer video meditation sessions, you would also be needing a video playback feature in addition to audio.
Gamification
Gamification is one of the greatest ways to boost retention and user engagement in an app. You can ask your app developer to include gamification features as per your audience preference.
Tracker and Statistics
Trackers and statistics help users see their progress in numbers and motivates them to work hard on their goal. To track the progress and battle effectively with depression or stress, you would need this feature.
Use the MVP
MVP is a basic version of an app with minimal features. Consider launching an MVP first to save on the cost to develop a meditation app. This way, you won’t only save money but also can get user feedback and add the most demanding features to your MVP accordingly.
Some basic features to include in MVP:
- User registration and sign-in
- User dashboard with progress tracking
- Basic gamification (optional)
- Pre-recorded meditation sessions
Conclusion
With mental health awareness on the rise, developing a meditation app is indeed a good idea. Here I’ve talked about things you need to know before developing a mediation app in 2023. By following these, you can create a meditation app that will meet user expectations.
Good luck with your meditation app development!
