Fitness App Development: Types, Features, Trends, Costs and more
Everyone’s top priorities have always included health and fitness. Back in the day, however, staying fit and on-trend was more difficult due to the difficulty of finding fitness coaches who you would enjoy working with. Fortunately, since the dawn of the digital era, the fitness industry has undergone a full digital transformation makeover as well. Since then, health and fitness app development have marked a variety of approaches, from cultivating healthy diets to weight loss exercises with only one tap on their smartphones.
Follow us and uou’ll learn about the latest features and get a step-by-step guide to creating a fitness app. You’ll also get an estimate for the cost of developing a fitness app. But first and foremost, let’s talk about the basics.
1. Fitness App Industry & Casestudies
1.1. Fitness App Industry & Market: Why Would You Make A Fitness App?
The fitness app market is expected to reach $14.7 billion by 2026, according to a study published by Market Watch in January 2019. The market is expected to expand at a CAGR of 23 percent over the forecast period. According to a Statista report, the Fitness segment’s revenue reached $17,963 million in 2020, and it has continued to expand rapidly.
As a result, revenue is expected to increase at a CAGR of 5.0 percent from 2019 to 2023, resulting in a market volume of $20,499 million by 2023. As a result, the fitness application market continues to grow and is expected to expand as new health and fitness features emerge.
Also from Statista, health and fitness apps were downloaded globally 593 million times in the first quarter of 2020. Health and fitness apps are expected to produce 656 million downloads by the end of the second quarter of 2020. Health and fitness apps were only downloaded 446 million times in the same quarter last year.
The global coronavirus pandemic, which has caused consumers to stay at home and restructure their exercise regimen and general lifestyle practices, is largely to blame for this rise.
1.2. Fitness App Types & Casestudies
Each type of fitness app has a notable casestudy that we would like to show you:
- In 2020, Fitbit led the activity tracking category in terms of new installs (4.8 million) and average daily active users (1.5 million).
- Since September 2020, MyFitnessPal has been the revenue leader among nutrition and diet apps, bringing in over $1.44 million.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOg4giNG9zc
Wanna Train | Fitness Platform | Created By Savvycom
- Wanna Train — Fitness Platform launch in Australia enable trainers to make $1000 a day. (View Full Design On Behance)
- Kokkiri — Meditation App has 50.000+ app installs after only 10 days of launching and ranked as no.1 in Fitness and Healthcare app in Google Store Korea. (View Full Design On Behance)
2. Fitness App Development: Key Features
Are you unsure what features to include in your exercise app? Each fitness app development serves a different purpose and provides its users with special features. However, there are some basic features that a fitness app must have in order to be more user-friendly and accommodating. We’ve put together a list of fitness apps’ must-have features.
2.1. Onboarding
When you need to explain app features or give instructions to new users, onboarding really comes in handy. (If your app is straightforward, you can skip this step.) When users interact with your app, you can provide onboarding by showing two to eight screens, adding a 60- to 90-second video tutorial, or sending in-app prompts. On Dribbble, you can see examples of onboarding.
2.2. Sign-up & Login
Allow users to sign up using their Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram accounts or other social media accounts that suit your target audience, as well as their own personal email addresses.
2.3. User profiles
Users enter personal information such as their name, age, height, weight, gender, and fitness level when creating a profile. Both app developers and users will benefit from this information. It assists app developers in creating apps that match users with customized workout routines and track their sporting activity. A user’s profile gives them easy access to subscription plans, as well as a history of completed exercises, progress, bonuses, and other information.
2.4. Goals
Setting goals is an important aspect of any fitness app. Allowing users to set objectives and goals is motivating because it translates into a goal tracker that will help them achieve their fitness goals without fail.
2.5. Synchronization with wearable devices
Which the rise of smart watch and other wearable devices like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, your Fitness App should ultimately be able to connect and synchronize with them. To combine data from fitness trackers and your fitness app, you can use the HealthKit and GoogleFit APIs. Apple Watch and Android smartwatches can be synced using the watchOS and Wear OS operating systems.
2.6. Workouts & exercises
Photos, 3D animated models, and video illustrations can all be used to illustrate exercises and workouts. Allow users to make their own workouts, use a standard set of exercises, or combine the two. You’ll need an organized and searchable content library for this.
2.7. Activity tracking
Your app can obtain activity tracking data in one of two ways: from smartphone sensors or by integrating with any wearable tracker. Smartphones allow your app to show the number of steps taken, the number of stairs climbed, the distance traveled, the speed, and the direction traveled — a noteworthy app can be mentioned here is Samsung Health. To sync with fitness wearables and measure other parameters like heart rate, sleep quality, or body temperature, you’ll need to add third-party APIs. You should also inquire about the parameters that users want to track.
2.8. Audio/video player
Exercises, workouts, running, yoga classes, meditation — audio/video podcasts with a trainer’s voice, a soundtrack, or a video tutorial can guide you through a variety of fitness activities. Users should be able to leave feedback, bookmark/favorite/like tracks, and return to them later in your fitness app player.
2.9. Product & recipe database
Access to a large database of products and healthy recipes, analysis of nutrition values, and data on ingredients received through a barcode scanner are some of the most compelling features of nutrition apps. Nutrition APIs are required to provide this functionality to users. Allow users to manually add goods to your app that they don’t see.
2.10. Workouts customization
Within your app, users can make their own workouts, meditations, exercise sets, recipes, or diet plans using a customization feature. This feature on paper might take a lot of work but in a user-centric world, your customer should be put in top priority.
2.11. Push notifications & reminders
The right text delivered at the right time will boost an app’s retention rate by three to tenfold. Push notifications for fitness apps should contain no more than 90 characters and be sent between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. or 12 a.m. and 2 p.m., according to Business of Apps. If your app allows users to customize the timing of reminders and push notifications or in some cases to turn off notifications completely, that’s a plus.
2.12. Recommendations
Machine learning algorithms can be used to provide personalized recommendations based on a user’s preferences and/or viewing history. Artificial intelligence (AI) enables an app to build customized fitness programs with dietary plans, and it has a good chance of outperforming any human personal trainer when it comes to accurately adjusting personal workouts.
2.13. Profile Settings
Users can change their passwords and emails, alter their notification settings, and deactivate their accounts using this feature.
2.14. Support & Customer Services
Users will appreciate a chat feature in a workout app where trainers provide real-time advice or consultations. If your app doesn’t have live chat options, consider combining a chatbot with pre-programmed responses. Nevertheless your app should include contact information that users can have access to at anytime, it not only increase your trust but also help at gathering much needed feedbacks.
2.15. Payment feature & method
The need for a payment feature is actually self-explainatory. How can you make money from your app if you don’t have it? Integrate a payment gateway into your app, such as PayPal, Visa, etc.
This is a brief summary of an article published on Savvycom blog. If you would like to learn more detailed information, feel free to read the full article.
