It is important to understand the users of the fitness app. This includes what they enjoy and dislike, the type of app that is most popular, and the number of competitors who have loyal users. This information is crucial to creating a fitness application that will succeed in the market.
What makes fitness apps popular?
Fitness apps have become popular with all generations in recent years. They provide virtual training, nutrition, and diet advice and teach other healthy activities such as yoga and meditation.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a major factor in the rise of fitness apps, as most people looked for diet and exercise plans online. According to an estimate, the global fitness app market revenue is expected to reach $33,04 billion in 2027.
Fitness apps are healthcare applications that promote a healthy lifestyle. They also encourage mental wellness, yoga, and exercise. You must learn about every aspect involved in building a successful app before you can create one for your company.
Top of the most popular fitness apps to know about
The first step to success is learning and understanding the qualities that make fitness apps successful. There is no better method to achieve this than by researching and learning about the most popular fitness apps that will be your main competitors.
You can only create a fitness application that stands out if you know what your competitors do right and wrong.
FitOn
FitOn is currently one of the top fitness apps on the market. It has over 5 million downloads in the Google Play Store and a 4.5+ rating on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The app became popular because it included celebrity trailers from Gabrielle Union and Cassey Hough, Kenta Seki, and Julianne.
There is a free version that includes many workouts and a paid version that offers customized meal plans, virtual coaching, and unlimited offline downloads. It also integrates fitness trackers. FitOn includes videos that cover strength training, HIIT cardio, dance and yoga, pilates, and kickboxing.
FitOn offers free access to high-quality videos and celebrity trainers. It also has multi-platform compatibility.
Cons include disorganized fitness videos, lack of customization, and fitness level indicators in mobile apps. This can make the app unsatisfactory for some users.
MyPlate Calorie Counter
MyPlate Calorie Counter lets users track and manage their calorie intake. The app has over 1 million downloads and 4+ reviews on Google Play Store. It also has 4.5+ reviews on Apple App Store.
The app includes a database of 2,000,000 food items, as well as a Barcode scanner for searching and tracking food. It also features customizable food and meals, personalized daily calorie goals, and data regarding calorie intake.
MyPlate Calorie Counter offers both free and premium accounts. Both accounts offer users different benefits.
These fitness apps can be used as inspiration to help you create a more user-friendly fitness app.
Types of Fitness Apps
It is important to analyze all fitness apps and determine which one will be most beneficial for your company.
Calorie Tracking Apps
Apps that track calories and diet allow users to manage and plan their fitness goals and monitor their calorie intake. These apps may include meal plans for calorie intake and fitness regimens to manage calories. They can also track calorie intake in real time and provide a detailed report of calorie intake and fitness improvements. The fitness industry is currently focusing on the development of nutrition and calorie-tracking apps.
Fitness Apps for Social Networking
Users can share their fitness progress and track fitness trends using social networking apps. The group aspect of this app encourages users to be more dedicated to their fitness and diet plans. These apps may also contain live videos, fitness challenges, and fitness training created by other users. This app is ideal for those who find it difficult to stay motivated toward their fitness and diet goals.
Workout and exercise apps
Apps for workouts and exercises are geared towards specific goals, such as weight loss, muscle building, or strength training. Some apps offer a variety of free and paid trainers. Others provide a complete workout course.
Yoga apps, which are popular platforms for exercising and learning yoga poses, provide virtual instruction as well as access to teachers.
How to generate revenue with a fitness app?
Before you begin the development of your fitness app, it is important to plan how you will generate revenue. You can incorporate different revenue streams into your fitness application.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
Include personalized ads in your fitness application to generate revenue immediately after launch. Make sure the video ads are relevant for your users, and reward them with a special feature.
In-app Purchases
In-app purchases for a fitness app include a subscription to a premium account and fitness products such as yoga mats and private training, courses in diet and nutrition, weights and muscle training, and heart rate monitors.
Sponsorships
You can increase your user base by partnering with fitness influencers or professional trainers, and you can also generate revenue. You can promote and include their content in your app, along with links to the websites.
App Promotions
In-app marketing is the process of promoting your app’s trainers, instructors, and courses. Many trainers and teachers, nutritionists, and exercise courses will be available in your fitness app. They will also want to make their content more visible. Advertise their profiles/content at a weekly/monthly rate.
How to Create a Fitness App In 10 Easy Steps
Only by following a strategic and well-planned development process can you build a fitness application that will outperform your competition.
Conduct Market Research
Market research for mobile fitness applications includes surveys of target users, evaluations of competitor apps, research into current and new technology development, and discovery and testing of products. These steps will help you collect valuable information for better project planning and implementation.
Product Discovery, a crucial step in market research is where you discuss your fitness app’s idea and potential. You discuss questions like:
- What is your target audience for your fitness app?
- What are your business objectives?
- What can users expect from an app that promotes fitness?
- What are the issues they have with fitness applications?
- How many competing apps are there?
- How many competitors have loyal users?
These questions will help you identify the needs of your target users and the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. You can then create a user-driven development plan to develop an application that will provide better products and services than your competitors.
Calculate the cost and timeframe
The average cost of building a fitness app ranges between $8,000 and $35,000. While project timelines and costs are dependent on business goals, fitness app developers, and the application’s complexity, they also depend on the project timeline. Your fitness app’s rates will be determined by the above factors, as each project is different.
The duration of building a fitness application can vary from 200 to 500 hrs depending on the complexity of the app, platform, technology, developers, and development strategy.
App Platform
App development requires the selection of a platform for app deployment. It is important to decide whether you will build a cross-platform or a single-platform app.
A single-platform application would be available to a certain user base, such as Android or iOS users. A cross-platform application is available on multiple platforms, such as iOS, Android Windows, and macOS. Cross-platform development can also be cost-effective and quicker.
If you want a high-performance fitness app, you should build Native fitness apps for each platform. Although the development costs are higher, you’ll have a more advanced application and a better user interface. This will improve your fitness app.
You have three choices.
Create a native app for a single platform, such as Android or iOS. It is faster and cheaper, but it limits your app’s reach.
Create separate native apps for different platforms, such as iOS, Android, and macOS. This process can be time-consuming and expensive, but it results in a high-performance and user-friendly application that will stand out in the fitness app market.
Create a cross-platform application for multiple platforms such as iOS, Android Web, Windows, and macOS, using a single codebase. This is a cost-effective process that simplifies, accelerates development, and delivers a user-friendly application (if hired by a competent development team).
Hire a Development Team
It can be difficult to hire the best development team for your fitness app, as there are many options available on the app market. You can hire freelancers, create your in-house team or outsource the fitness app development company that is located onshore, offshore, or nearshore.
You will need to create an in-house team by providing a workspace, utilities, and resources such as internet, computers, and laptops. Also, you’ll have to offer a package of employment for each member, including QA engineer and tester, UI/UX Designer, iOS Developer, Android Developer, Backend Developer, QA Engineer, etc. Planning and managing the development of your health and fitness application will be easier.
It is easy to hire freelancers and it’s cost-effective, but it can be risky if you don’t have an original idea. It is difficult to manage or monitor freelancers, and it can be dangerous to share sensitive or common data about your fitness app. This could lead to data leaks or theft. You may find and manage the best freelance developers with an effective hiring and monitoring process, but this is not recommended.
Costs are almost the same for an in-house team and outsourcing to nearshore and onshore developers. They are also easy to monitor, and they take on responsibility for managing teams and collaborating.
The most profitable option for hiring developers is to outsource their work to offshore developers. Offshore developers have a good understanding of the global app market and are self-sufficient and cost-effective. Since they can deliver on time, maintain quality, and work in a team, they rarely require monitoring.
Choose Tech Stack
Which technology stack you choose for your fitness will determine the functionality/performance, fitness app development cost, and project timelines. It is therefore best to select them with the help of an experienced team. They are more familiar with the technical requirements for different applications.
You can find a list of the most important tech stacks that you will need to develop your fitness app.
Your fitness app project may require less or more technology than what is listed above. This will depend on the project goals, the complexity of your app, security requirements, and number of developers.
Build an MVP app
If you’re building your first fitness app, it is best, to begin with a minimally viable product. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a simplified version of your app that only contains the features needed to meet the requirements of the target audience.
It is faster and cheaper to create an MVP, which allows you to test the app quickly and get ready for deployment. After deployment, you can use the feedback from users to improve the app with a user-driven approach.
Focus on App Core Features
It is best to focus on the most important features when developing a fitness app, especially if it’s your first. You can monitor your project’s potential, strengths, and weaknesses without spending a lot of money.
Fitness apps have several core features.
- Register & Sign in
- User Profile
- Workout Menu
- Dashboard
- Diet Plans
- Push Notifications
- Social Sharing
- Geolocation
- Goals and Tracker
- Virtual Coaches
By incorporating such features into your fitness app, you can include all the essential elements and accelerate development at affordable prices.
Focus on UI/UX design
The user interface is what determines the look and feel of your app, as well as how easy it will be to use its features and functions. If it takes your users longer than one to two minutes to locate the workout regimens section in your exercise and workout app, then you have a badly designed user interface. Color psychology is also important to design a workout application that appeals to your target audience.
User experience, unlike UI, is the overall experience that users have when using your application. The user experience is all about the speed of page loading, payments that are quick or slow, and how fast or slow your search and purchasing process is.
A poor user experience will usually lead users to competitors while a positive one will increase user acquisition, customer retention, and loyalty.
Test for Quality Assurance
App testing will help you identify any bugs or errors in the UI/UX of your fitness app. App testing is necessary to identify and fix bugs, crashes, and unexpected downtimes in your fitness app.
You must therefore conduct both manual testing and test automation, including pen testing, to ensure that your fitness app meets the required standards. You can evaluate fitness apps from the end user’s perspective using methods like user acceptance tests.
This allows you to see the app from your users’ point of view, giving you valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the app. This information can be used to fix bugs and errors, improve the app or make it more user-friendly.
Marketing Strategy for Deployment
If you don’t use an effective strategy for marketing before deployment, many users could miss your app. The success of your fitness app will be determined by the level of awareness and discoverability. You must therefore use an effective marketing campaign to increase awareness and application discoverability before deploying it.
Use methods such as social media platforms, email marketing, landing page, influencer marketing, and app store optimization.
After deployment, once you’ve spread awareness of your app, you can improve its discoverability and increase the number of users.
Provide App Maintenance
Each app needs to be maintained for bugs, UI/UX issues, security, updates, and OS optimizations. A lack of app upkeep can result in a poor user experience that leads to app installation and customer abandonment. You must therefore plan for regular maintenance of the fitness app before its deployment.
Monitor user feedback and reviews to ensure that you are regularly providing user-driven updates. This will increase your app’s user retention and acquisition rates. App maintenance is important because it creates an enjoyable user experience. It can prevent or fix app glitches and crashes.
Conclusion:
You can build a fitness application that will succeed and outlast its competitors by analyzing your business needs and market expectations. By addressing the demand for user-friendly apps, you can create an app that is valuable for your target users. You need a company that offers a complete solution for app development to effectively plan and execute the process.
A team of developers can plan and manage the development of your fitness app, regardless of whether your niche is diet and nutrition or muscle training. They know how they can build an app to capture the attention and interest of your target audience.
Request an estimate now to get started on your app project.