How to Build a Health and Fitness App: Step by Step Guide

Do you want to capture the billion-dollar health and fitness industry? The COVID-19 global pandemic has made people more health-conscious and active. People are giving huge importance to physical health to stay productive and live their life to the fullest. This is where mobile app development is changing the healthcare industry with health and fitness apps. 

Custom healthcare software development has enabled healthcare companies to develop fitness, mHealth and telemedicine applications. Accordingly, the users are now able to track their health condition, and fitness stats, and receive treatment via virtual consultancy. In this health and fitness app development guide, we are going to learn how to build a health and fitness app.

Cost to Create Health and Fitness Applications

The health and fitness application development cost might depend on different factors such as design requirements, team size, functionality requirements, and development approach, chosen platform/s, etc. It might cost you around $6000 to $60,000 in the development process. Plus, you might need additional money for promotional purposes.

Let’s learn about the time that you would need in the designing, development, testing, and deployment process of the application; 

Process	Time
Ideation and Design Prototyping	24 – 40 hours
UI and UX Design	50 – 90 hours
Content Creation	24 – 30 hours
iOS, Android, and Cross-Platform Development	120 – 200 hours
Back-end Development	150 – 400 hours
Quality Testing	50 – 100 hours
Deployment and Polishing	20 – 40 hours

The Market Potential of Fitness Apps 

Undoubtedly, the market for health and fitness apps have grown massively after the Covid-19 pandemic. Above all, these are some facts and figures, which might astonish us about the market size of health and fitness apps; 

• According to MarketWatch, the global health and fitness app net worth is expected to reach $14.7 billion by 2026 and it will continue to grow at a whopping 23% CAGR.  
• According to a report by Statista, the annual revenue of health and fitness apps had already reached $16,857 million in 2019 
• The downloads of health and fitness apps increased by 45% worldwide, India witnessed the highest growth in downloads (increase by 156%). This brought 58 million new active users. 

Types of Fitness and Health Apps 

Before we dive into the designing and development process, we must know about the different types of fitness and health apps. This would help you better determine the fitness app development cost. Furthermore, telemedicine and fitness apps fall into the subgroups of mHealth applications. 

We can divide the health and fitness apps into four categories; 

• Nutrition and dieting apps 
• Sports and workout apps 
• Fitness activity tracking apps 
• Fitness coach and class finder apps 

Let’s Learn about each of the applications: 

1. Nutrition and Dieting Apps 

These days people are very conscious about what they eat throughout the day to achieve their diet goals. They want to record every nutritional value that they intake from their diet. Health and fitness apps are able to record individual diet schemes by tracking the nutritional value of a wide variety of food products. 

The nutrition and dieting apps are the perfect solutions to assist individuals to fulfill their necessary food portions, water balance, etc. Furthermore, the users are also able to learn about their calorie burn to gain/lose/maintain their weight. 

2. Sports and Workout Apps 

These days fitness apps for sports and workouts have become very popular among people. They can use these applications at their home if they don’t want to go to a gym. In fact, during the global pandemic, many workout applications were gaining massive popularity among smartphone and wearable devices users. 

The sports and workout apps enable people to create their own personalized plans for physical wellbeing. Furthermore, these apps consider the historical medical data to suggest the best recommendations for sports and workouts. Accordingly, this is only possible by considering the individual health and fitness requirements. Both amateurs and professionals can rely on these applications to improve their strength, stamina, speed, agility, and other physical characteristics. 

3. Fitness Activity Tracker Apps 

Instead of just tracking and suggesting workout and sports routines, fitness activity tracker apps help users to monitor their ongoing physical activities. Instead of working with historical data, these health and fitness apps focus on operational data sets that give personal progress insights. 

Users can track different metrics such as daily step count, walking/jogging/running routes and distances, heart level, oxygen level, blood pressure, and more. However, these metrics are generally collected from smart wearable devices and can then be shown on any display in the UI-driven and data-rich diagrams, graphs, and tables. 

4. Fitness Coach and Class Finder Apps 

These applications are very similar to mHealth or telemedicine apps because they also supplement communication between individuals. The fitness coach and class finder apps provide a great value to both gym owners and health enthusiast users. 

The users can rely on these applications to discover local gyms, personal trainers, and sports fields. Every detail like phone numbers, email addresses, office addresses, and reviews can be listed on these applications. 

 How Can You Make Money From a Health and Fitness App?

 

So far we have learnt about the different types of apps in this health and fitness app development guide. Now, let’s understand how health and fitness apps actually make money from the users. After rolling out your health and fitness app in the market, there are different strategies to monetize your fitness application. Thus, these are some most popular monetization approaches; 

• Paid Subscription Plans 

You can either create a one-time model or choose the SaaS payment approach for your health and fitness app. Thus, these approaches can ensure a guaranteed revenue stream for your application. 

• Freemium Model with In-app Purchases

The free version of your application will only provide users access to core features. Thus, they have to make a payment to access the more advanced and valuable features of your health and fitness app. 

• Cross-Sale Ads

The health and fitness apps often show ads on some screens to create a constant revenue stream. Thus, you can also implement ads without getting too annoying for the users and ruining the overall experience. 

• Built-in Promo Links and Content  

These links and content are generally owned by third parties and they lead the users to sponsor websites and social media handles. Thus, you have to be very careful if you want to implement this model of earning since it might put their loyalty to your health and fitness app at risk.

Core Features That You Should Add to Your Health and Fitness App

Advanced fitness application development might bring some unique features to the health and fitness apps. However, you must forget to integrate these basic features;

a. User Profiles 

Health and fitness apps are meant to create a personalized experience for the users. In fact, they should be able to set their personal health and fitness goals with the application. The users might have a  goal of gaining weight, losing weight, or eating healthy. Thus, your health and fitness app must have the ability to create user profiles in order to upload their physical data such as height, weight, age, and medical conditions. 

b. Notifications 

Health and fitness apps have become the motivating factor behind our healthy bodies. Your app must have In-app notifications to keep motivating the users continuously. In fact, these notifications can be about almost anything including diet plans, workout plans, weight loss/gain plans, etc. 

c. Tracking Physical Activity 

Tracking the physical activities of the user is the main of a health and fitness app. It could be achieved by connecting the smartphone to wearable devices and integrating Google Fit API or Apple’s Health Kit. Furthermore, These APIs help in the fitness application development by accessing the health and fitness data collected from different devices.  

d. Social Sharing 

You must consider social sharing in your fitness application development because these days everyone is connected through instant communication channels. Thus, the users of your health and fitness app might want to share the fitness results with their friends and family. 

e. Geolocation

Your health and fitness app should be using hardware capabilities and geolocation facilities to show accurate data. In fact, your app should show how many kilometers the user has walked, cycled, or ran with the help of a map. Ultimately, this is a huge motivation and satisfaction factor from users’ point of view. 

f. Tons of Customization 

Health and fitness app users love to fiddle with settings and customize to personalize their user experience. Thus, you must consider customization options like push notifications, reminders, theme settings, font sizes, and more during your fitness application development. 

g. Personalized Workout Plans 

If you are getting into fitness application development, then your app should provide personalized workout plans depending on your user’s preferences. Plus, you can also allow them to create their own workout plans. 

h. Building Goals 

There’s a sense of complete satisfaction when we achieve our goals. Above all, the health and fitness app should allow users to set their personal goals and share them on social media platforms. This makes the user experience more engaging and fulfilling. Furthermore, the users are constantly motivated to push their limits and achieve more in their fitness goals. 

i. Educational Material

Fitness enthusiasts often search for blogs and videos related to health and wellness. You can integrate some educational material during the fitness application development process. Above all, the content could be about anything like workouts, diets, lifestyle, or any other topic that might create interest among your target audience. Ultimately, this will make sure that the users spend more time on your health and fitness application.  

Health and Fitness Application Development Process

Now, it’s to learn about the complete fitness application development process in our health and fitness app development guide. Accordingly, we have divided the process into different steps for better understanding; 

1. Research and Analysis 

Before diving into fitness application development, you must understand the market and the potential of your app idea. In fact, you have to understand the mindset of your target audience and the devices that they are likely to use. 

Understand what problems you will be solving in your health and fitness app and how it differs from your competitors in the market. Your app idea must drive value and utility among the users. Then, you will be able to capture the attention of your target market. Moreover, you can also conduct a competitor analysis to polish your idea and take a step further than your competitors. Lastly, in the research and analysis process, you might yourself the following questions; 

• What are the key USPs of your health and fitness app idea? 
• Which mobile platforms should you cover to reach your target audience?
• How do you envision people using your application? 

2. Hiring the Right Fitness Application Development Team 

The technical team behind the development process plays an important role in determining the overall success of the app. You can build an in-house development team for the job. However, hiring a mobile app development company could be a more sensible decision because you will get access to a team with years of experience in mobile app development and expertise with multiple tools and technologies. Lastly, you should pay attention to the following factors while hiring a mobile app development company; 

• Experience in the mobile app development market 
• Diversity of mobile app development portfolio 
• Customer feedback of the company 
• Availability of developers working on different stacks 

MobileCoderz, a healthcare and fitness app development company that can fulfil your fitness application development in the most professional manner and under your defined budget. 

3. Prototyping and User-Testing 

Prototyping is all about the interactive representation of your application. Furthermore, it helps the app owners learn what might actually work and what might not. In fact, this fair idea about the design and functionalities becomes critical in the future development process of health and fitness apps. Lastly, there are two types of prototyping used in the development process of these apps; 

a. Low Fidelity Prototypes 

These low-cost prototypes are used to get the initial look and feel of a future application. In healthcare application development, these prototypes are used to check the validity of ideas and concepts. Users consider it a great way of envisioning the product, flow, or certain block. 

b. High Fidelity Prototypes 

These prototypes have become an integral part of the fitness application development process. This option provides a much clearer vision of the final product. However, it takes more time and resources to be designed. Developers consider these prototypes as the best way to test design for compliance with accessibility requirements and hypotheses. 

Choose the Right Technology Stack 

Once you have got your prototype ready and the idea validated, it’s time to choose the right technology stack for fitness application development. 

Let’s discuss why you need to choose a technology stack; 

• The chosen technology stack might affect the budget for healthcare application development 
• A technology stack might create a certain limitation on your mobile app’s capabilities. 

So what are the options? 

– Native Applications 

Native apps are meant to provide a more authentic user experience on a dedicated mobile operating system. They are able to utilize the full potential of platform hardware and produce an incredible user experience. However, it takes more time and resources to develop native applications. 

– Cross-Platform Applications 

These applications are able to run on multiple platforms using the same codebase. Developers take the best advantage of platform-independent technologies such as HTML and CSS to deliver a great user experience just like native applications. React Native, Flutter, and Kotlin Multiplatform have gained massive popularity for creating cross-platform apps. Thus, the health and fitness app developers can create a single application and reuse much of the code on both iOS and Android. 

– Progressive Web Applications

These applications are a great way to scale an existing web application into mobile applications. The developers don’t have to rely on external or platform hardware while developing progressive web applications. However, this approach is rarely chosen from health and fitness apps. 

– UI/UX Designing 

After selecting the right technology stack for your health and fitness app, you have to work on the UI/UX design.

The user experience is the most important aspect of any application these days. Your app development team has to work on a comprehensive application interface and screen relationships. Lastly, this should be your UX strategy while developing your health and fitness app; 

• Make a proper information diagram to show data structure and interconnections
• Work on the high-fidelity prototype with interactive features 
• Create a roadmap of your project plans with tasks and deadlines 

– MVP Development

Developing a Minimal Viable Product gives you multiple benefits in the fitness application development process. First, you can reduce the overall development cost. Then it could shorten the time to deploy the application. Lastly, it could provide vital feedback from the customers. Developers can then analyze the feedback given by the customers to further tweak the design and functionalities of the health and fitness app.

– Development of the Application 

This is where all the planned features are implemented in the application and create the required software architecture. The mobile app developers will be focusing on user feedback and the progress of the health and fitness application. Moreover, it is always better to develop the application by following the Agile methodology. 

– Testing the Application 

This is where the QA engineers will be creating special test cases for the app to conduct rigorous testing. Testing can be done by both manual and automated methods. Above all, the intent of testing is to find critical errors, bugs, and vulnerabilities in the application. Furthermore, the QA engineers can also suggest the scope of further improvements in the application. 

Where do you need to focus during the testing process? 

• Fixing flaws in the app 
• Identifying issues in the app 
• Gathering input from users and evaluating it
• Improving the app’s functionality 
• Understanding the KPIs for the mobile app 

– Deployment of the Health and Fitness App

The deployment process isn’t easy especially if you are developing your app for multiple mobile platforms. There are some rules and guidelines by Play Store and App Store, which must be followed by the app publishers if they want to publish the health and fitness app in their respective stores. 

The development team of your application should create a definitive checklist during the development process. Therefore, this will help you ensure smooth deployment of the app on iOS or Android (or both).  

– Maintenance of the App

The development cycle of the health and fitness app is not complete even after the development. Furthermore, you must monitor the success of your application through analytics tools and reviews. This would further help you to tweak the overall experience and maximize user satisfaction. 

These are some critical tips for maintaining your application; 

• Use built-in mobile analytics tools like Google Analytics or Flurry to learn about the application usage 
• Keep an eye on the user reviews and app feedback (through app store reviews or emails) 
• Keep updating the app according to the current trends with new features to stay relevant in the market  

Team Required for Fitness Application Development 

The size of the team depends on the scale and complexity of your health and fitness application. For effective fitness application development, you might require the following professionals in your project; 

• iOS/Android Developers 
• Project manager 
• UI/UX designer 
• QA engineer 
• Backend developer 

Reasons to Hire a Fitness App Development Company? 

It is always better to outsource the fitness app development because you might be able to comprehend the challenges faced in the development process. Plus, it is hard to constantly adapt to the ongoing changes in the market. Therefore, the right development team can help you fulfil your requirements related to time, resources, and quality. 

These are some points to consider: 

• They can handle the huge workload of your fitness app 
• Manage the complexity of your app and all the features 
• Give dedicated time for timely development 
• Project managers to follow up on your defined deadlines 
• Keep your budget intact during the development process

Hire MobileCoderz for Health and Fitness App Development 

If you want to develop world-class health and fitness apps, then MobileCoderz could provide you with the perfect development team for the job. We have experienced fitness app development developers with years of experience and expertise with the most innovative tools and technologies. Accordingly, you can get fully customizable mobile applications with our expertise and professionalism.