Fitness Mobile App Development: A Guide to Building & Launching

This blog outlines essential factors, and processes and covers all the necessary questions to help you build and launch a perfect app. Read the entire blog till the end to explore costing of a fitness app development, and learn how to successfully launch your app from scratch

Most of the modern world population actively uses social media, which means information sharing has become easy and quick. This has also given rise to influencers, especially fitness influencers form a huge part of today’s social media. People these days are highly conscious of their health. Fitness enthusiasm was soon noticed by the business giants, which gave rise to fitness mobile app development in Texas. 

From tracking your daily footsteps to keeping a note of your heart rate and other health aspects, fitness apps have garnered a lot of praise. With so many players in the market, ensuring an app’s success becomes challenging. If your business idea is to launch an impressive fitness app in the market, then this blog has been waiting for you. Here you will get comprehensive details of fitness app development, how the process takes place, the features that you need to add, and more.

Role of Covid-19 in fitness app popularity

According to Statista, the Fitness App Market is projected to experience a 14.34% CAGR between 2023 and 2027, leading to a projected market size of USD 33.04 billion by 2027. The primary factor behind this strong push in the fitness app market was the covid-19 pandemic. The fear of weak immunity made people more conscious of their health, and they resorted towards working out and exercise.

Not everybody can spare time to visit gyms, this led to an increase in home exercises, and people started leveraging fitness apps. Apart from providing fitness tracking features, these apps also involve live fitness classes curated by experts.

Here are some key factors that expanded fitness mobile app usage:

• Gyms and fitness centers adopted the digital approach during the pandemic.
• An increased awareness of health and well-being emerged among the populace.
• The surge in health check-ups motivated individuals to consider gym memberships.
• Remote work and sedentary lifestyles during lockdowns highlighted the need for accessible fitness solutions.
• Social media influencers and online fitness communities played a significant role in promoting fitness and motivating people to join gyms.

Essential Features of a Fitness App

The features of your app can either make or break your app. Hence, it's important to add unique and useful features to the app that make your app stand out differently from other fitness apps in the market. Below are some of the top features that you must include in your fitness apps.

➜User registration: account creation is one of the first and basic features of the fitness app, for easy profile creation, allows users to create an account on your app using a mobile number, Gmail, or any social media account. Make this section flexible and allow users to customize and add their personal details to their profile for a more personalized experience.

➜Activity tracking: you must include an activity tracking feature in your app that will allow users to track their different activities like how many calories are burnt, and how much workout is done. This will help users set goals and identify the areas where they need to work and make necessary improvements.

➜Social sharing: keep the social integration feature in your app, this will allow users to share their achievements and other things to stay motivated. This will also help in app marketing when any users share about your app on social platforms.

➜Workout plans and exercises: your app must have workout plans and exercise libraries such as pilates, cardio, basic workout, advanced workout, and many more where users can search and select from a list of workouts to perform. 

➜Progress tracking: include an analytics tool in your app to track progress on a daily basis. Use pictures, graphs, and other visual representations to let users see their progress and key metrics.

➜Customized recommendations: there is no one exercise or workout that suits all, hence provide customized recommendations based on analytics and tracking habits of users. This can include a survey asking about user goals, and understanding their lifestyle, and food-eating habits to provide the best recommendation.

➜Nutrition and meal planning: A healthy meal is important to achieve fitness goals accurately. You must include various meal recipes and nutrient advice to keep users educated and follow a healthy diet while working out.

➜App challenges and competitions:  to make your app enjoyable, you must add weekly or monthly challenges for users and competitions where multiple users can invite their friends to join and share the results and rewards over online platforms.

➜Notifications and reminders: Make sure your app pops useful reminders to help users make healthy habits. Make sure your app is notifying user on missed diets, missed workouts or if the fitness goal is not fulfilled or any other activity. This will help users stay disciplined and make the most out of their fitness goals.

➜Offline access:  offline access is one of the useful app features that allows users to access content from anywhere without the Internet.  Don't forget to add offline features where users can access their downloaded workouts and access the important content to perform the workout without interruption.

➜In-app purchase and safe payment: add a secure payment gateway and flexible payment methods to allow users to pay for the service plan hassle-free. You can go for a free plan for a few months and then ask the user to upgrade to a basic or advanced plan once they figure out their fitness needs.

➜Online consultation and support: add fitness experts, nutritionists, and dieticians across the globe to contribute to your app.  Including a fitness trainer or consultation can be a good idea to educate users and acknowledge the right methods and techniques of exercise.

➜Video tutorials or knowledge base: video tutorials or a knowledge base section with questionnaires and articles are the best way to help users of your app in a correct way. This helps to improve user experience. Make sure you import useful video tutorials by a reputed fitness trainer and add important articles with tips and recipes to help users more precisely.

Things to Consider While Developing Fitness Application

The fitness app development market is highly competitive with new and unique apps coming up every day. This means that the app provided by your vendor should be thoroughly tested and you should have knowledge of all stages of the app development process. Below are some crucial points to remember while building a robust fitness app:

Smartphones brought fitness applications on high trends as they have made people well informed about their physical health. Launching a well-designed and user-friendly fitness mobile app is not a cakewalk, but as a business owner, you should be aware of the entire process followed by app development companies:

#1. Market research and target audience: It is essential that these factors are taken into consideration if you are building a fitness app. It gives you an insight into how the fitness app market is shaping up, trends being followed by the top ranked fitness service providers, etc. It assists in finalizing the prices, features, marketing techniques, etc. Information collected at this stage can provide valuable tips that will help in delivering satisfactory results. 

#2. Unique UI/UX designs: Choosing the right User Interface / User Experience (UI / UX) designing will be necessary to ensure your fitness app’s prosperity. Not only does a unique and distinct design look good, but it plays a significant role in keeping users engaged and satisfied. Always avoid overly complicated app designs because present day users are highly impatient. Providing easy and hassle-free navigation in the app also leads to happy users. 

#3. Marketing and production planning: Promotion and marketing is essential for the growth of any fitness application. It is the gateway through which the user will interact with your product/service. A good plan helps raise visibility, brings in new app installations and keeps existing users engaged! That includes using social media tactics, collaborating with fitness influencers, optimizing mobile app store listing, and using engaging advertisements. Additionally, it is necessary to keep your users interested through ongoing marketing efforts. With the competition in the fitness app space, having an effective marketing plan helps your app stand out so it can acquire the required user base.

#4. App launching: This key stage is further divided into various segments to ensure that the app is launched with precision:

➤ Testing and Quality Assurance: Testing is essential to fix bugs and errors that could create slowdowns in the app’s performance. When we are thinking about testing — make sure you test for multiple devices, different operating systems, and more user scenarios so that the user will have an amazing experience using your application.

➤ User Acceptance Testing (UAT): This includes collaborating with actual people to test the app. It helps in gathering genuine feedback on the app and then making changes accordingly. 

➤ App Store Submission: The step involves gathering all the required assets needed for submission on app stores, i.e., icon, feature images, metadata such as descriptions, and relevant keywords. Be sure to follow the guidelines pertaining to the app stores like Apple App Store, Google Play Store etc.

➤ App Store Optimization (ASO): Use ASO tactics for bettering app discoverability on app stores. These include choosing effective keywords, making your app’s title and description attractive for users to read about, and encouraging your audience to leave positive ratings and feedback.

#5. Post-launch performance: If you aim at being unique in this competitive fitness app market then you should lay emphasis on user engagement and retention. Aspects like updates and innovations, fun-gaming, live 24/7 chat support system etc. give higher user engagement. 

Conclusion

Do you want an excellent quality and expert app development company that can make your dream of launching an excellent Fitness App come true? If you just shook your head in agreement, then Maneksoft can act as a perfectly reliable fitness app development partner for you. We have two decades of experience in developing feature-rich and responsive custom mobile applications using advanced technologies.

Being a top-most mobile app development company in Texas, we have a team of skilled experts, starting from engineers to developers to designers to analysts and managers on our board who put their best efforts into serving you with the finest output. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so please feel free to reach out by email at [email protected]!

FAQs:

1) What makes a good fitness app?

There is no perfect definition of a good fitness app but it should prioritize personal goals and user preferences. The good fitness app is easily launched and contains all the essential features that meet user fitness goals like workout reminders, personalized recommendations, tracking goals, and more.

2) What are the types of fitness apps?

There are many types of fitness apps that vary from user needs to needs:

• Workout and exercise apps
• Diet and nutrition apps
• Activity tracking apps
• Yoga and meditation apps
• Personal trainer apps
• Wellness apps 
• Wellness apps
• Specialized fitness apps and more.

3) How long does it take to develop a fitness app?

The time for a fitness app development can range from 3 to 9 months, depending on its complexity, feature set, and the efficiency of the development team. If you are seeking to develop basic fitness apps, it can be easily completed in 3 months while advanced apps could take 6 months or more.

4) What technologies are used in fitness app development?

Most of the successfully running fitness apps use technologies like Flutter or React Native for cross-platform development, Swift for iOS, and Kotlin for Android.  For Backend technologies Node.js or Django, with databases like MongoDB or Firebase is the best choice as it helps in real-time data management.

5) How much does it cost to develop a fitness app?

Based on our research and experience in app development, we can say the cost of developing a fitness app can range between $10,000 to $50,000 or more based on factors like app categories, app complexity, feature set, design, development team location, and platform choice (iOS, Android, or both). However, if you prefer a minimum viable product then it might get completed at affordable rates.