Sport offers a sound mind, strong muscles, and good health for people. Most of them start working passionately but rapidly stop training because they don’t see immediate results and have no idea how to monitor their progress in real-time. The tech world already has a solution to such an issue; that’s why the world-known sports giants (e.g., Under Armor, Nike, or Adidas) create fitness apps. The stats prove that users adore this idea: the worldwide fitness app industry is predicted to have a $13 billion benefit by the 2025 year-end.
This post will cover common types of fitness apps, tips on preparing for software building, and ways to obtain profit.
Sports Market App Overview
Fitness apps provide a lot more than just exercising. There are various fitness solution types on the market to meet the demands of all customers. Let’s look at the most common ones.
Apps for Workout Logging
It’s the most accessible type of fitness software. There users can offer data about each workout completed. Information concerning the number of calories burnt, the muscle areas trained, and the general condition would also be available after each training session.
Workout logging apps can track even more data using connected devices (e.g., smart scales can track the muscle-to-fat ratio).
How to make a fitness app of such type? The following basic functionality should be provided:
- Providing workout notes is necessary to monitor muscle training and energy used.
- Due to the third-party services integration, the user can have a complete picture of their progress.
- The workout database holds info regarding energy use, muscle groups being worked on, and training recommendations.
Examples: Users often apply to products from software leaders such as Samsung Health and Huawei Health. Via these apps, people can monitor daily physical activity.
Activity Monitoring
These apps keep track of their users’ activities, having a step counter to track moves throughout the day. The users may also activate the app while jogging or cycling to make it remember their path.
You can also build your own fitness app for activity monitoring. It will include such features as:
- Geolocation — essential to assess the distance covered, track the journey, and calculate slopes and lifts.
- Accelerometer — scoring the number of steps during the day. It also calculates cadence during cycling and running to optimize leg loadings and produce better outcomes.
Examples: Runtastic is a well-known example of an activity monitoring app. Runners may explore their routes, or participate in various fitness challenges, and compete against one another via leaderboards.
Smart Sport Coach
Collaboration with an individual coach is essential for people’s success. Instructors usually care about enhancing fitness success by every client knowing how to make them more sporty. But such coaches often demand a high cost for their services. Customers may not always have the opportunity to pay or go to the gym.
That’s why training apps (including a smart fitness coach) are built. If you want to create such a solution, the following essential features should be included:
- Exercise screens. Provide your customers with each exercise roadmap. It can help them gain results without injuries.
- Training levels can assist people in getting desirable shapes as soon as possible.
- Algorithms for recognizing workouts are necessary to assess users’ physical state and provide a suitable training plan.
Examples: Fitbit Coach solution offers pre-recorded workout videos for users’ training sessions as well as customized workouts. It also asks whether a training session was hard. The workouts of Nike Training Club equipped with video instructions are generated according to the current physical state of the customer. Though users can choose a fitting one themselves.
Nutrition and Diet
All physical activity is useless without a well-balanced diet. Nutrition and diet applications are designed to keep track of the food users eat during the day and observe its nutritional value and calories consumption.
How to create your own fitness app tracking nutrition and diet? Provide it with the following key features:
- Intuitive navigation. To navigate recipes and products monitoring necessary data quickly, the users should have search hints and filters.
- An extensive food database may show all the data about meal products worldwide (such as different caloric content or composition).
- Suggested recipes. Some apps offer paid healthy recipes or even complete meal plans tailored to the needs of each user.
- Food customization. If a user cannot locate a particular dish in the database, they should be able to add it themselves. Checking the actual quantity of calories in each item before addition is required.
Examples: MyFitnessPal and Lifesum are two of the most well-known diet applications. These solutions interact with third-party applications to accurately assess daily calories consumption. They can also change diets based on physical activity levels, and keep track of how much water the user drinks.
How to Create a Fitness Software: an MVP Feature Set
If you create your fitness software from scratch, you should consider the feature list and start with a minimum viable product (MVP) development. Its functionality will assist you in defining whether your product is beneficial for users.
Registration may not be necessary if your app is only a simple step counter. But users should always register to obtain special training or nutrition programs. This feature also lets you collect more information about your users to enhance their app experience.
User account. Height, weight, age, and other characteristics in a private page are helpful in personalized exercises creation and gaining faster results.
The training menu can be different based on the app type, but the concept is the same. Smart fitness coach apps, for example, may include a menu of workout alternatives as well as an exercise demo.
The menu of Nike Training Club
Statistics. When consumers can’t see visible results, detailed data presented as charts and diagrams assist them in grasping their progress. There are two sorts of statistics: global (showing progress over a specified time) and local (allowing users to monitor their success from one workout to another).
Huawei Health post-training statistics
Third-party services implementation. If you create your own fitness app, it should be synchronized with other health and training software to obtain more functionality. For instance, planning to define physical activity according to the user’s exercise heart rate, you can sync your software with Google Fit or Apple Health platforms.
Synchronizing with wearable devices (such as smart scales, various fitness trackers, smartwatches, etc.) would help obtaining more stats for your fitness software. You can also create a fitness solution only for wearables, with the same app features as for smartphones.
A meal database should be in every fitness app to give customers a choice of activities or food products. If people can’t find what they’re looking for in your app, they’ll likely abandon it and look for something else.
Lifesum meal database
Additional Functionality to Create a Fitness Software
You can also provide your fitness app with advanced features. It will help you make a developed software more customer-friendly and unique. But bear in mind that the final fitness app development cost may vary due to the complexity of the functionality chosen.
Coach Upon Request
When you create a fitness app, offer individual training sessions for your customers at an additional charge. They’ll learn new exercises via live stream and change their workout plan along with the coach.
Leaderboards And Communities
Gamify the training process giving users a reason to engage in sports. It will function the following way: gaining points after exercises or workout sessions completion, people will compete with one another trying to come into a more advanced league.
Integration with Social Media
It’s always exciting to tell friends about your accomplishments. With this purpose, you can create your own fitness app with social interaction elements. They allow people to publish a quick post regarding their sporting achievements.
Live Streaming/Video-on-Demand
You should provide users with a video instruction as to the exercise technique. Live streaming is one of the ways to do that: you can attend online group training sessions with skilled coaches. Video-on-demand (VoD) training sessions will allow users to follow the instructions in the pre-recorded videos.
Barcode Reader
A barcode scanner is a valuable feature because it recognizes the product and the manufacturer. You can employ machine vision algorithms if products don’t have a barcode (e.g., fruit or vegetables). But keep in mind that this method necessitates the AI developers’ participation, which might be expensive while you build a fitness app.
Monetization Strategies for Fitness Apps
After you care about a user, it’s high time to care about yourself choosing one of the most popular revenue models to gain profit.
Advertisements. Integrate the partners’ ads (e.g., promoting products or different healthy menus) in your app. This is a popular monetization model used by widely-known sports companies in their apps (like Adidas Runtastic). But keep in mind that it’s crucial not to misapply ads as the users don’t like them.
Commercial software requires payments immediately upon installation. You can set a budget-friendly price to engage users and cover the development charges. The Oh She Glows software development team acted this way. Their app is available on Android for $2,49 and $1,99 on iOS, including in-app purchases.
In-app purchases. Your fitness app can be used and distributed for free. However, the customers may optionally pay an additional fee for some advanced features. Such widely known sporting solutions as MyFitnessPal or LifeSum offer in-app purchases for users to extend the apps’ basic functionality.
Combined. If you want to obtain the highest profit, you can experiment by combining several monetization models in your app. For instance, allow your users to remove the ads with a premium subscription. You can get revenue this way from subscribed customers and those who use the app for free.
Starting Your Fitness App Development: Tips to Consider
Before starting your software building, you should consider a range of activities to get a successful end product.
First off, conduct market research. Remember that you’ll miss targeted users and be unaware of your competitors’ advantages, neglecting such an important part of your preparations.
how to perform market research
After that, you may enter upon writing a feature list that will be useful for your development team to choose a tech stack according to your requirements.
The discovery stage is another crucial step in the preparation process. Project managers, designers, developers, and QA engineers get together to produce a project definition and wireframes for the next project.
Finally, it’s time to define how much the project will cost. It’s difficult to determine the actual cost of your project without understanding the specific needs, so think about them before contacting your vendor. The final price is defined by the number of platforms for which the app is being developed, the features complexity, post-release support, and other factors.
Wrapping Up
How to make a workout app and succeed? You should consider various details that can make an upcoming software user-friendly, flexible and modern. A competent software development team can assist you in such a process. The specialists will reply to all the annoying questions, provide you with accurate estimations of the work completed and do everything to create a cost-effective and competitive fitness app.
