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Perceiving the present status of the world, people have become more adaptive to the age-old saying "Prevention is Better than Cure". Globally, millions are spent each year to improve mental as well as physical well-being and to experience an extravagant quality of life.
So, don't be surprised if you see the boy next door turning into a fitness freak suddenly.
But why?
Simply because nothing can match an active body that is deeply interrelated with a sound mind. Thanks to the rapid growth of fitness tracking app development around the globe that has significantly transformed the way people maintain their quest for personal fitness through mobile applications.
As of 1st quarter of 2019, there were 37,143 health and fitness apps listed in Google Play Store alone and this number is increasing steadily. The outbreak of COVID-19 last year, along with its restrictions like human isolation, social distancing, and lockdown protocol, ushered fitness & wellness mobile app development substantially, inspiring hundreds of people to stay at home and restructure their exercise regimen and general lifestyle practices.
According to an article published in the World Economic Forum in September 2020, health and fitness app downloads grew by 46% worldwide between Q1 and Q2 2020. Daily active users for these fitness apps also increased by 24%, showing that people weren’t just downloading these apps and forgetting about them—they were actually using them.
Increasing penetration of smartphones and mobile users globally, rising awareness pertaining to health, wellness, and hygiene, busy working schedules, increasing demand for wearables, and most importantly the anxiety of getting infected amidst the pandemic have widely propagated the growth of fitness apps recently.
Let’s dig deeper!
- What is a Fitness App?
- 10 Key Advantages of Fitness Apps
- Top 25 Must-Have Features of All-in-One Fitness Apps
- Cost of Fitness App Development
- Summing Up!
What is a Fitness App?
A Fitness app provides fitness and wellness advice to its users through a set of exercise activities, nutritional diet charts, and even real-time health coaching. These apps utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies to provide personalized fitness programs to their customers. They can be downloaded from app stores and can be used anytime and anywhere.
For example, My Fitness Pal, Lose It!, Runtastic and Strava are leading fitness apps available in the market that help users maintain their everyday fitness routine by monitoring their eating habits, tracking footsteps, calories burnt, etc.
10 Key Advantages of Fitness Apps
1. Helps to Monitor Diet
Fitness apps like Carrot Fit, Waterlogged, etc help users to effortlessly keep track of their daily nutritional routine and assist in weight loss/gain programs by calculating their daily calorie intake, water intake, fat, and carbohydrate content in the meal.
2. Tracks Footsteps
Pedometers in apps like Google Fit and Fitbit help users to track the number of steps essential for controlling weight, blood sugar levels, etc. These can improve the daily step counts and motivate users to achieve their fitness goals conveniently.
3. AI-enabled Personal Coach
Most fitness apps come with AI-enabled coaches who can guide you to do your exercises in the right manner. These trainers act like human trainers and can also give you tips to build your strength and stamina.
4. Set Goals
With such apps, users are able to set their own fitness goals in the app, like, target weight, proportion of calories to intake, foods to avoid, etc. Having such goals written inspires individuals to work toward them.
5. Easier to Monitor Progress
Fitness apps provide pictorial presentations of users’ health progress through charts and comparison graphs. With this constant analysis of data, people can formulate their daily schedules or incorporate changes required to meet their goals. For example, apps mySugr, and Diabetes Connect show your current as well as previous glucose reading for analysis and action.
6. Workout anytime anywhere
These apps give you the liberty to work out at a convenient time. With these apps, you no longer need to depend upon your dietician’s work schedule or hit the gym or wait for an expert appointment.
Moreover, since most of the home workout applications focus on home workouts, they come up with such exercises that don’t require you to buy any equipment. So, whether you are on a business trip, family vacation, or out of town for any other reason, you have no excuse to miss your workout.
7. Free health tips and advice on the change of activities
Get unlimited and free health tips on your fitness apps to keep you moving. Depending upon your progress, health apps can also advise you to make a change in the course of your exercise activities and nutritional diets for better results.
8. Availability of multiple trainers/nutritionists in one place
Online Fitness Apps have solved the problem of finding a suitable health expert by accumulating a range of fitness experts, trainers, and dieticians in one place. Users can choose to get advice from these experts anytime and anywhere through the app.
9. One-stop Health Tool
Fitness Apps provide an all-in-one platform for monitoring several health parameters like calorie count, water intake, glucose level, heart rate, BMR rate, step count, etc comfortably. Users don't need to maintain separate logs.
10. Keeps users motivated
Daily notifications, active reminders, and sharing success stories around the world motivate users to stick to their fitness routines.
Top 25 Must-Have Features of All-in-One Fitness Apps
Well-thought and aptly designed features guarantee the success of an app. So it is necessary to incorporate all the important features during mobile fitness app development for an effective solution. Let us dwell on each of them:
1. Sign up and Log in
Users should be able to sign up using their social media credentials or create a new account to get started.
2. User Profile and User dashboard
To offer a personalized experience to your users, it is important for your application to have users’ personal information like gender, age, weight, height, etc. The user dashboard should be simple, intuitive, and visually attractive.
3. Setting Goals/ Targets
Create a fitness app that allows users to set goals. These targets could be for workouts, number of steps, hours of sleep, calorie limit, or even weight gain/loss.
4. Overall Progress Tracker
The dashboard must clearly show your users their progress towards their goals, say, in the form of charts, or comparison graphs. This will help them understand the areas of improvement and also motivate them to push themselves further.
5. Heart Monitoring
Electrical or optical heart sensors let users measure their heart rate variability anytime anywhere and take proactive action if something of concern is detected.
6. Sleep Tracker
This feature measures the sleep of users in terms of awake, light sleep, and deep sleep. Looking at today’s busy lifestyle, this feature is a must for users to track when they didn’t get sound sleep.
7. Altimeter
This feature tracks the number of stairs climbed and the change in altitude to give users more precise information about their movements.
8. Activity Tracker
Connect your app with all kinds of activity-tracking sensors like pedometers, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and compasses in order to track walking, running, cycling, and even swimming activities.
9. Geo-location
To help users create different routes for walking, running, and cycling and track the distance traversed, an integrated geo-location tracker linked to local maps and routes can be useful.
10. Food Tracker
Allow users to log in to their food intake. This will help them keep a close watch on their daily calorie intake.
11. Water Tracker
It is important to keep a check on the daily water intake of a user. This feature reminds users to drink water and stay hydrated during the day.
Alt Text: Water Tracker reminds users to stay hydrated
12. Personalised Workout & Diet Plans
One plan doesn’t fit all bodies. Hence, it’s important that your app studies each individual’s choices & targets and accordingly offers customized diet & workout plans. These should be easily accessible by users at any time.
13. Audio/Video Tutorials
Ramp up the workout experience with audio/video guides. This will help users understand the right way of doing a workout and lessen the risk of injuries.
14. Online Consultation with Experts
Users will appreciate it if they can get in touch with an expert right from the app to get the best solution for their health concerns via a telephone call, chat, or video conferencing. This will boost your user engagement.
15. Secure Payment Gateway
Enable your customers to opt for premium and paid services of your app by implementing a secure payment gateway through cards, e-wallets, etc.
16. Multi-Device Synchronization
The majority of users today have multiple devices. Hence, to get an edge, ask your fitness app developer to make you an app that is quickly and easily compatible with more than one device, like wearable watches or smartphones.
17. Social Media Integration
In the age of social media, people love to share, communicate and show off their accomplishments. Hence your app needs to be integrated with the various social media accounts to allow users to share their progress and also invite competition from friends and family. This can be a perfect way to expand your daily active users as well as promote your brand. A win-win for both!
18. In-App Community
By building an in-app community, you will be able to foster competition among your users which is the best way to engage and retain them. Moreover, they can follow friends and influencers to get some tips or to feel motivated and work harder towards reaching their goals.
19. Health Tips
Share valuable tips with users (general or personalized) at regular intervals to keep them happy with your services so that they keep coming back to your platform for more.
20. Health & Wellness Blogs
Posting high-quality relevant articles that users can relate to is a great way to educate them. This can also be helpful in your app’s marketing strategy in order to entice new joiners.
21. Notifications
Notifications and reminders are an integral part of any mhealth app. In this case, reminders can be for workout sessions, updating food logbooks, water intake, etc.
Pro Tip: Setting up a notification system can be tricky as too many notifications might annoy users and force them to uninstall your app.
22. Online Store
Increase your business’ revenue by selling fitness-related things on your app like gym membership deals, fitness equipment, or dietary supplements.
You may read about more monetization strategies in this article - 9 Full-Proof Strategies to Increase Medical Mobile App Revenue & Customer Base
23. Reviews and Feedback
Feedback can help you understand the challenges your users are facing while using the app and fill in the gaps to offer quality service and a delightful user experience.
24. Customer Support
This is important for users to get solutions to their queries. You may consider setting up chatbots to route basic and frequently asked questions in order to reduce the response time, lower customer support costs, and yet have an efficient customer support system.
25. Sensitive Data Protection
Build a fitness mobile app that complies with the guidelines of HIPAA, FDA, and other regulatory systems for protecting sensitive user information against vulnerable data breaches. We can’t afford to have a similar data breach like Strava’s Heat Map of 2017.
Apart from these, incorporating some of the following advanced features will help you to stand out and gain an edge over your competitors.
- Gamification through rewards and competition like Zombie Run! and Runtastic.
- Live streaming allows users to broadcast their workouts.
- Integration with Music Apps cheers up users and yields wonderful results.
- Barcode Scanner for scanning product information as used by MyFitnessPal.
- AI-based Machine Vision Algorithm for consumable products that don't have barcodes (vegetables and fruits).
- Speech Recognition for speech to text translation.
Cost of Fitness App Development
The cost of fitness mobile app development depends upon several factors, including:
- The number of platforms you want to release your app in.
- Required number of features in your application
- App design – the more complex your design is (say, animations), the more you pay.
- Tech Stack – Native or cross-platform, Laravel, Python, AWS, Google, Azure, etc.
- Whether using advanced technologies such as AI and Machine Learning.
- Expected timeline to build your app
- The location of fitness app developers. Generally speaking, developers in the USA or Europe charge more than Indian developers.
- Size of the development team
To give you a ballpark figure, the minimum budget for a healthcare mobile app development should be around $60,000 for a single platform, which can go up to $500,000 or even more.
Summing Up!
Though the idea of a fitness app dates a decade back, the transformation of these apps has been exponential in modern times. In 2010, when Fit Phone, by far the first fitness app, hit the market, nobody knew that the future of fitness apps would be so engrossing and successful. Today, innovative features like real-time activity trackers, location trackers, calorie counters; integration with smart watches have made it possible for people to maintain a healthy lifestyle remotely and virtually. The gradual transformation of everything going digital, rising awareness about health & hygiene, and shift towards home workouts unfold innumerable opportunities in the development of fitness/gym apps. So, if you are interested in joining the league, choose the right fitness app development company to get started.
Tech Exactly has developed a surfeit of accomplished, customized, and feature-rich mobile applications over the years with a diverse global clientele. Partnering with us, you get a dedicated team whose skills are enriching enough to understand your business requirements for an effective and cost-efficient fitness app development solution. Right from conceptualization and strategy analysis to designing, development, and release, we assure a helping hand to add wings to your dream of providing an ultimate fitness station to your users.
Contact our technology experts today for a feature-rich fitness application. Call or chat online!
