If all you intend to do is clone another copy of the already-existing, proven medical app and get rich quickly, then we sincerely hope you’d stop. Otherwise, chances are high you’ll waste your time and money.
Here’s why:
Contents
- Here’s why:
- An example springs to mind:
- Steps To Create A Fitness App From Scratch
- Set The Goal
- Research The Idea
- Pick A Business Model Determine Your Monetization Strategy
- Define Your Target Audience and Create a Persona Based on Their Needs and Motivations
- Decide What Features You Want In Your App
- Choose Your App Platform
- App Design
- App Development Of The Fitness App
- Launch And Promote The Application
- Continuous Monitoring And Regular Update
- Conclusion
The fitness app market is one of the most competitive in the world. Most of these apps make a pitiful amount of profits for their developers.
So, listen up – we are going to give you the most valuable advice you will ever get:
When developing an app, if the app doesn’t have a pressing problem to solve, don’t build it. And yes, consider the massive medical-related opportunities that are now dominating headlines.
An example springs to mind:
Back pain.
It hurts almost everyone at some point in their lives, and it can be quite debilitating for some people.
Back pain is one of the most common ailments in America. According to Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute: 65 million Americans have a recent back pain story to tell, while 8% of the adult population (16 million people) is experiencing chronic pains. It’s also one of the most expensive conditions for U.S. employers, costing over $12 billion annually in direct costs and lost productivity.
There are many causes for back pain: poor posture, lifting heavy objects incorrectly, being overweight or obese, genetics, and age, among others. But let’s focus on what we can control: our daily habits!
Motivated by the rising cost of healthcare and increased awareness, people are looking for ways to improve their lifestyles outside of traditional medicine. And many are turning to fitness apps.
Now, imagine a fitness app that can draw people’s attention to the issue through personalized recommendations based on their weight history, medical records, and current symptoms. The app could also provide customized mobility exercises for users based on their specific condition and level of mobility impairment (i.e., mild or severe). Users would earn points by doing these exercises and then use those points to buy merchandise or services from your business or a third party.
Got our point? Great!
Now let’s dive in and tell you everything you need to know about creating a fitness app that’ll get you the desired results.
Steps To Create A Fitness App From Scratch
Set The Goal
The first thing you want to do is set the goal for your fitness app. You need to know what you want this app to do and how it will help people. Do you want it to be a journal, or do you want it to be more of a motivational tool? Asking yourself these questions will help you figure out what type of fitness app you should create.
Understand That There Are Different Types Of Mobile Fitness Applications
Nowadays, “Fitness” is a catchall term for anything that’ll help keep a person physically fit. It makes the line blurry between what constitutes a fitness app and what constitutes a health app. That said, fitness apps are categorized into:
Exercise and Training Apps: This category contains tools for tracking workouts, measuring performance data, and creating custom training plans based on one’s goals and abilities. They are great for people who want to get fit but aren’t sure how to start or what exercises to do.
Diet and Nutrition Apps: These apps help you track your diet and nutritional intake. They can also include meal plans and recipes. The best part about these apps is that they can be personalized based on users’ needs or goals. They’re popular among individuals who want to track their diet or lose weight as part of their health and fitness goals.
Activity Tracking Apps: These apps are designed to help you track your activities, such as workout sessions, walking steps, sleep, and other metrics. They aim to help keep the users motivated and accountable and give them insights into their progress over time. They may include features like a timer, heart rate monitor, calorie counter, and more.
Research The Idea
You need to do some research to get an idea of whether or not your app is viable. Here are some questions you should ask yourself:
Is there already an app that does what I want mine to do? Look at similar apps in the App Store and Google Play Store and see if yours would be different enough from them to stand out from the crowd. If it is too similar, then there may not be a reason for people to use your app instead of theirs.
What problem does my app solve? Apps should solve problems for their users! Remember the example we gave earlier at the beginning of this post? That’s precisely what this means.
Pick A Business Model Determine Your Monetization Strategy
Many ways to monetize a fitness app include in-app purchases, subscriptions, advertising, and selling data. Choose the one that works best for your product.
Define Your Target Audience and Create a Persona Based on Their Needs and Motivations
You must also consider who you are making this fitness app for. Is it for men or women? Are they young adults, or are they retired?
Instead of relying solely on demographic information, we need to understand our users’ motivations. This is where personas come into play. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer. They describe their goals, interests, and motivations so we can better build products that meet their needs.
Once you have an idea of your target audience, it becomes easier for you to decide which features would be most beneficial for them.
Decide What Features You Want In Your App
Features are what make your app unique and useful. You can develop a list of features based on your experience or survey what people want to see in an app.
Once you have a list of potential features, it’s time to narrow them down to the ones that will be most useful for your target audience. Decide which features will help people accomplish their goals and which ones they would expect from an app like yours. For example, if you’re creating an exercise app, people would expect it to include workout tracking tools.
Here are some of the most common features in fitness apps:
● Sign up/ Sign in: Users need to be able to sign up for your app and sign in when they return.
● User profile: The user should be able to create, view, and edit their information as needed.
● Dashboard: The dashboard is where users can see all their stats. The dashboard would show the user’s progress over time so they can see how far they’ve come!
● Third-party integration: It is the ability to connect your app with other apps or services like Fitbit, Apple Health, and Google Fit. It also includes social media integration.
Others include an activity log, alert notifications, a goal-setting feature, education/tutorials, in-app messaging, leaderboards, gamification, push notifications, alert reminders, and so on.
You may not have all the answers to all the features your app requires right away, but don’t worry — you can always change or add the features later. Just make sure you choose something useful for your users now and in the future.
Choose Your App Platform
There are a lot of options to choose from. The most popular platforms include iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
There are also other factors to consider when choosing your app platform. For example, if you plan on building an app in more affluent societies, then iOS would likely be the best option. If you want to create for global markets targeting developing economies, in particular, Android would be better since it has a more significant number of users.
Finally, you could develop a cross-platform app that can run on multiple platforms. For example, you could build an app for both Android and iOS devices. This option is great if you want to reach a wider audience, but it also comes with its challenges.
App Design
App design is critical to how users interact with your product. It’s essential to remember the target audience, their goals, and the platforms they use to access your app.
There are two components of app design are:
● UI- The user interface is the look and feel of the app. It is where you will put all the buttons, menus, and other elements to make your app work. The UI is what the users interact with when they use the app.
● UX- User Experience is how people feel when using your app. It includes how easy it is to use, how enjoyable it is and whether or not people want to keep using it.
During the design phase, app designers would create sketches, wireframes, and mockups to visualize how the app will look and feel. The wireframe is a low-fidelity prototype that outlines what an app may look like when it’s finished. Mockups are more advanced versions of wireframes that show more details about the user interface and visual design. This process helps them know exactly what your fitness app will look like once launched. They can also use different tools like InVision and Sketch during this process.
Generally, the design should be simple and easy to use so that users can easily navigate it. It should also be visually appealing, so they don’t feel like they are using a piece of software that doesn’t care about them or their experience.
Some fitness app design best practices include:
● Make sure all buttons, menus, and features are clearly visible. Avoid using small fonts and icons that are hard to click on.
● Use bright colors to distinguish between different menu items and sections of the app. Make sure these colors don’t distract from the content itself.
● Keep interface elements consistent throughout the app to look cohesive and easy to navigate.
● Give users options for how they want to interact with your app — whether through gestures or buttons.
● Make sure the interface is intuitive enough so that users don’t have to spend time learning how everything works before they can start using it effectively.
● You should ensure that everyone can use your app, regardless of physical abilities or disabilities. For example, you could make sure that people who are blind can still use your app if they have access to voice-to-text.
App Development Of The Fitness App
Once the design phase is over, developers start working on building your fitness app. This phase involves writing the actual code that makes your app function properly. Developers use programming languages like Kotlin( for Android apps), Swift( for iOS apps), and many others.
The development process of an app can be divided into two parts – Frontend and backend development.
● Frontend Development: Frontend development is about creating a beautiful user interface (UI) and ensuring everything works properly. It includes designing the login page and other screens, adding functionalities like social login, payment gateway integration, etc., and testing it on different devices/platforms.
● Backend Development: Backend development deals with creating a scalable infrastructure that can handle millions of users daily without any downtime or errors. It means creating databases, setting up APIs using frameworks, and managing servers.
Building A Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
A MVP is a basic model of your app. Its primary purpose is to validate your idea and ensure that people are interested in using it before you invest too much time, money, and effort into full-scale development.
App Testing And Quality Assurance
This stage tests whether all features are working correctly or not by testing them against real-world scenarios and checking and fixing bugs or errors in the code.
Should You Hire A Development Team, Or Do It Yourself?
If you want to build an app for your gym or fitness studio, there are many reasons why hiring a development team is the best choice:
● Experience – You can’t learn everything overnight. Teams have been working together for years, so they know what they are doing and how to do it quickly and efficiently. They have also built hundreds of apps and know what works and what doesn’t.
● Cost – As with any business venture, time equals money. Hiring a team saves money in two ways: first, by eliminating trial and error; second, by ensuring quality delivery, thus preventing you from costly rebuilds due to botched projects.
● Quality – The quality of an app depends on many factors, but one thing that always matters is skills. And app development teams tend to have this in abundance because they can pull together a team of experts, each with their expertise. Also, they could pull out more resources than a freelancer, or an individual would be able to do so.
Launch And Promote The Application
The next step in building a fitness app is to launch the application. Meaning it’s time to make your application available for download on the App Store, Google Play Store, and other similar stores.
App Store Optimization (ASO)
ASO is the process of improving your app’s visibility in the App Store and Google Play. It encompasses a wide range of activities for optimizing your app to rank higher in the search results. It involves different aspects like keywords, titles, metadata, and screenshots.
● Keywords: Keywords are words or phrases that users enter while searching on Google Play or App Store. The goal is to have your app appear in the top rankings when potential users search those keywords.
● Title: The title of your app should be well-written, descriptive, and unique. It should also include relevant keywords.
● Description: The description should be well-written and informative and include relevant keywords used in other places such as title, icon, etc.
● Screenshots: Screenshots are images that represent what the user can expect from using your product/app. They should be high quality and convey value to the customer by highlighting important aspects of your mobile app.
Once you’ve launched your app in the stores, you’ll want to start marketing it as soon as possible. You can promote your fitness app through influencer marketing, advertisements, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or even email marketing campaigns.
In addition to promoting your fitness app through social media, you can also create a blog where people can learn more about using it and how it works.
Continuous Monitoring And Regular Update
Congratulations, you’ve successfully launched your fitness app, and thousands of users are downloading it. The next step is continuously monitoring user engagement and ensuring it’s increasing.
It’s vital to track the number of active users, how many times they use your app and how often they use it. This will help you understand if your app is working effectively or not. Also, regularly check for bugs and glitches in your app and provide support for any queries from the users.
Timely Updates
You need to make sure that you update your app regularly. Updates could include adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the user experience.
One more thing:
Constantly update your app so users can always find what they are looking for and get the most out of your app. Also, updates will help you keep up with developments in the field of fitness tracking.
Importance of User Feedback
You will be able to improve your app with regular user feedback. You can collect user feedback via surveys or email them directly with questions related to your app. You should also provide a way for users to submit their feedback in-app and through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Conclusion
We’ll end with this: building a fitness app is not just for the technologically inclined or a fitness enthusiast. Regardless of whether you’re a developer or a gym regular, you have the power to take your idea and make it a reality. All it takes is some good old-fashioned elbow grease and the right skills. We hope that our article has helped to provide you with some valuable guidelines for developing a fitness app and launching it successfully. As always, feel free to contact us if you have any questions!