Fitness apps have been helping people stay healthier and happier, especially in the pandemic years. Over the last decade, the paid fitness app revenue grew exponentially and is projected to reach 19.33 billion USD this year.Fitness apps can help users become better versions of themselves by offering workout routines, nutritional guidelines, activity tracking, etc. That’s why a lot of entrepreneurs search for a qualified custom wellness app development team to develop their apps and help people while making profits.
Benefits of Developing Your Own Fitness App
There are a lot of business benefits to having your fitness app. Some of them include:
- Increasing your brand’s visibility and brand awareness in the growing market of fitness apps, where users are often people with medium and high incomes.
- Creating a loyal and engaged community of followers that interact with the app and your brand on social media and recommend the app to their friends and relatives.
- Generating additional income streams by offering premium features, subscriptions, or in-app purchases.
- Paving the way to the future development of other products or maybe even a whole digital fitness ecosystem.
All these are complimented by the benefit of helping people and making a difference in their well-being.
Challenges of Developing Your Own Fitness App
But as with every product, developing your own fitness app can entail some difficulties such as:
- Facing high competition from existing and established fitness apps and influencers on the market.
- Investing a lot of money and resources into development and promotion without achieving tangible results.
- Ensuring the high quality and security of an app that contains sensitive medical data.
- Compliance with industry standards and regulations in the context of fitness apps and apps in general.
- Constant maintenance and updating of the app to meet user expectations and feedback and to stand out among the competitors.
These are some of the challenges you can’t avoid, but you can minimize them by following the steps of developing a fitness app.
5 Steps of Developing Your Own Fitness App
Here are some basic steps that will ensure your product will meet the users’ wellness requirements as well as bring you profit.
Step 1: Define Scope and Audience
Before diving into development, define the purpose and type of your app. You can choose between creating a workout app, nutrition or diet app, activity tracking app, or developing an app that contains all these features.
Research existing fitness apps; analyze market trends, user preferences, and needs to identify the target audience. Your audience can vary depending on the type and purpose of the app and can be either very specific — like targeting certain demographics, or wide — engaging all population categories. But you can’t proceed without learning everything about your key audience and their wishes.
Step 2: Plan App Features and Design
After you’ve figured out the purpose of your app, it’s time to decide on the features and design concepts. Using your market analysis findings, determine the functionality your app should have.
It can include photo/video tutorials, lessons, personalized programs, progress tracking, exercise feedback, etc. Then decide how you want to present them — with the help of the user interface, branding, graphics, links — the list goes on. Set the main colors for the app and hire a designer to create app concepts. You will use them later during the development stage.
Step 3: Choose Technology Stack and Find a Team
As a business owner, you may know all the business intricacies but need some assistance on the development side. A team of qualified developers can help you with choosing the platforms to run your app on (e.g., iOS, Android, or making a cross-platform app), as well as devices it will be available on (e.g., smartphone, tablet, wearable).
The development team will study your goals and app specifics to determine which tools, frameworks, and libraries to use. They can also assess future maintenance and updating costs.
Step 4: Create an MVP First
The step that will save you the most money is developing an MVP first before launching the full-fledged product. A minimum viable product is basically a prototype of the future app with its core functions. It allows for testing the product and validating its functionality with real users.
User testing at this point will gather a lot of valuable information and insights that will allow you to evaluate the app’s usability and performance. Doing it at this stage rather than after the hard launch will cost time and money spent on app optimization.
Step 5: Launch and Market the App
The last step can be a little tedious and require a lot of effort. No matter how great your product is, people won’t buy it unless they learn about it from somewhere. And it’s your job to put it out there.
Publish your app on the app platforms and promote it using different channels like social media networks, blogs, vlogs, influencer recommendations, etc. Monitor the performance metrics including reviews, ratings, downloads, as well as the user behavior metrics like retention and engagement. This will allow you to measure the app’s success.
To Wrap Up
Developing a fitness app can be tricky. You’ll need to put in a lot of effort and take the whole process very seriously since the well-being of users is at stake. However, there are certain steps that can be followed to minimize issues and maximize the app’s success.
A team of qualified designers and developers will help you determine the key characteristics, features, and functions of the app to make it a digital triumph. Choose your vendor wisely and start your fitness app journey!