These days everything is online, even those workout sessions, right? 

Nike training club app hit a 100% upsurge in weekly active users during the 2020 lockdown period. This clearly presents the need to stay fit is on the crest.

Certainly, this makes it a high time to find out how to make your own Fitness App and grab a piece of this hot pie.

But remember, when planning your debut mobile app, it’s inevitable to have everything just perfect. 

So, Without Any Ado Let’s Dive Right Into The Insight!

Why Develop A Fitness App – A Market Audit

If you are sitting at the fence of whether or not to create a Fitness app, think no more as statistics define the following:

# Fitness App Stats 1: In January 2021, top mobile fitness and workout apps witnessed 16.20 million app downloads globally. While the 2020 global COVID-19 epidemic played a significant role in the increased usage of fitness and workout apps, the trend is expected to outlast the repercussions of lockdowns and restrictions.

#Fitness App Stats 2: In a Statista survey, the number of fitness app users increased from 62.7 million in 2018 to 87.4 million users in 2020. It’s estimated that by 2022, the overall number of users will equal 86.3 million.

#Fitness App Stats 3: The revenue of fitness from app market is predicted to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2019-2023) of 7.2% resulting in a market volume of US $3,072 million in 2023. 

So, fitness apps are gaining traction as more and more brands invest in web and mobile app development. So, building a fitness app gives your business a dynamic competitive edge. 

But, if still, you are not sure whether creating a fitness app is worth your time and budget? 

Continue reading to learn how to make a fitness app and curate a lucrative place in the market. 

Also Read: How much does it cost to build an app?

The Popular Types Of Fitness Mobile Apps

To create a fitness app you need to choose its type. Fitness apps provide their users with different features: result tracking, motivation to keep going, socializing, and even education on the topic. It’s like having your own affordable personal coach in your pocket.

The performance features divide fit apps into three types of mobile healthcare apps

• Activity tracking apps
• Diet and nutrition apps
• Workout and exercise apps
• Meditation apps

Let’s look at each of them.

• Workout and Exercise Apps

In the fitness mobile app space, a workout app is one of its own kind. It offers you a personal fitness trainer on your smartphone that you can take anywhere and exercise with that trainer whenever you want. 

In some scenarios, you can even choose a coach by their name and level of physical training, as it’s a USP (Unique Selling Point) of most of the ABs workout app. Some other features to be included are:

• Timer

The timer is essential when doing strength or the “Yoga, Cardio and more” options. With this feature, you can choose the time interval to perform movements, starting from 2 minutes to what you are comfortable with. Besides, while sweating out, you can pause, skip exercises, and turn sound on and off from the workout screen. 

• Different Programs

Every user has different workout requirements. And, offering an array of programs through which the user can choose which part of the body they want to work out first, makes the difference. 

The experienced app developers include options like “Full Body”, “Upper Body”, “Lower Body”, “Core Strength”, “Custom Workout”. 

• Social Share

When users have completed their workout routine, the app invites and challenges their friends by posting on Facebook and Twitter.

• Diet and Nutrition Apps

Nutritional and diet mobile apps help users keep track of their eating habits, count the number of calories consumed/burned, water balance, body weight and so forth. Though, with a distinctive array of diet apps, users can easily set personal goals, make grocery lists, and even collect recipes. 

Let’s understand with an example; you could also possess some gamification elements or user-engaging features like slimming competition or scoreboards. Diet and nutritional apps can also be considered activity tracking apps because they monitor your nutritional habits. The only difference is that they have more specific functionality. 

Have a look at some of the main features to include in your diet and fitness app: 

• Community 

Users can easily share tips and advice, as well as develop connections through sharing personal experiences or struggles as same in the MyFitnessPal forum. 

• Calorie Counter

Also, you can consider integrating an online diary with a calorie counter. The app also automatically saves favourite users food and snacks and besides makes them an easy find. On the whole, users install a diet app to adhere to a specific diet, track calories and manage water and coffee intake. 

• Diet Manager

In this app, users receive access to a mammoth database of foods and acquire a target number of calories based on their age, sex and weight. 

So, in a nutshell, your nutrition and diet app should offer users detailed and comprehensive daily stats. Notably, an app should push users towards achieving their goals.

• Activity Tracking Apps

The sheath apps in this category can keep track of a user’s physical activity – pretty much almost everything you have done during the day. Activity tracking apps gather user information about the number of steps taken, sleeping hours, distance and speed run, and lastly, burned calories. 

As a whole, the app shows the user data on the app screen, and the app is often able to build charts, saving routes on your visited track, showing progress. One such example is the HealthKit  app, it stores and manages the following:

Exercise duration
Number of steps/distance traveled
Burned calories
Favorite sports or activity
Weight history and body measurement

• Meditation Apps 

The meditation apps are often considered yoga fitness apps also. They offer users different levels of exercises that help them keep peace of mind and do yoga. Even it’s essential to remember that such practices should be classified into different groups of complexity based on the user’s level.

So, if you want to know how to build a workout app with the highest user retention rate, your answer is this type of app development. They have functionality like daily reminders to inform users about sessions. Examples like Daily Yoga and the Breathe by Apple are pioneers of meditation apps.

How to Make a Fitness App? Know How!  

If you are at the brink of bringing your business idea into a reality, follow the steps described below for a sky-rocket yet seamless start: 

1. Choose the Monetization Model

How to make your fitness app rewarding?

Well, there are numerous ways to reap profits. And, for your future business, you can choose among the following:

• Freebie

In this monetization model, your app users receive basic app features for free but pay for the premium features. This can also be considered as a premium subscription model as basic features are free to use, but advanced fitness plans or personal coaching services are paid.

• Ads

In your app development, you can cooperate with other fitness-oriented businesses and allow them to run advertising campaigns in your own fitness app. Besides, you can also charge a cost-per-click or a cost-per-mile commission. 

• In-app Purchases

If you want to roll out a free fitness app and make it rewarding, you can motivate users to purchase something in your app. There are myriad types of in-app purchases you can offer, from premium content to healthful diet recipes.  

• Sponsored Content

The sponsored content business model consists of partnering with fitness experts and gyms. Your partner can share valuable content with app users and augment your app with their experience and expertise. 

• Paid Apps 

Before users use the app, users should buy it. The price of the app varies depending on the app type, mobile platform, and content you provide.  

2. Pay Attention To Basic Fitness App Features

While every app has a unique feature and functionality set, there are some basic features inescapable to all apps. And, to develop your own fitness app, consider the following fitness app ideas:

• User Profile

Considering the diet and nutritional apps, their core objective is to help users achieve their personal goals, including healthy eating, losing weight or even gaining healthy weight. 

Therefore, it’s crucial to make a profile with personal data where users can enter and update their physical characteristics like height, age and current weight. 

• Track Physical Activity

Connecting your fitness app with a smartphone’s sensors to integrate the tracking function is made simple using Apple’s HealthKit and Google Fit via APIs to access the health and fitness data collected on their platforms. 

• Social Share

The feature of social sharing allows users to connect, share their results, and they will be happy to share with the world about your app and its USP (Unique Selling Point).

• Notifications

Notifications are a crucial part of fitness mobile app development in Dubai as it reminds users about workout sessions and pushes them continuously. Also, notifications can be synchronized with a workout plan or personal objectives and can notify users about the upcoming exercise. 

• Geolocation

It gives a sense of utter satisfaction seeing you how many kilometres you have run, cycled, walked by, simply looking at the map. 

3. Hire a Dedicated Development Team

To make your fitness app a big success, you need to hire the best mobile app development company in Dubai that turns your business idea into an operational reality. At this stage, vet developers from different countries having different hourly rates.

App Developers from Dubai	$25-49/hr
Developers from Easter Europe	$50-99/hr
Developers from Western Europe

4. The Initial Point

Every project development starts with the product discovery phase. In this stage, you and your development team will: 

• Outline the scope of work needed for the project
• Define project roadmap
• Plan resources and decide the MVP budget

Undoubtedly, the discovery phase takes several weeks. It sheaths a functional specification development, the making of UX/UI design, and a visual prototype of your app to offer you a clear vision of the end product. 

5.  A Bespoke Design

The design team usually takes a month to craft an outstanding design for the fitness app – both UX and UI elements. And, when it’s about fitness app design, the cost depends on the requirements -or if you only need standard features, but you also want some custom micro-interactions.  

6. Quality! Quality! Quality 

Testing and debugging takes up another chunk of the development time. Besides validating the code for bugs, QA engineers test the complete user experience of the app along with the features that work as they are expected to.  

How Much It Costs To Make A Fitness App?

It’s quite daunting to offer you a fair and square cost for developing a fitness app without clear terms of reference. The cost to build a fitness app depends on the app’s type and its complexity. 

The table below sheath a rough estimation of hours and cost for developing a fitness app. 

Phases	Time Estimation	Cost Per Hour
Documentation	75+ hrs	$25/hr
Design	150+ hrs	$25/hr
Development	900+ hrs	$25/hr
Project Management	220 + hrs	$25/hr
Quality Assurance	250+ hrs	$25/hr

The Final Thought…

Fitness app development can be onerous at first, but now that you know how to make a successful fitness app, I hope it will be easier for you to estimate the cost of your fitness app idea. 

Here’s A quick rundown to Bubble It All Up

• Your app should have the best fitness app features like setting goals, personal accounts, actual activity tracking and social elements. 
• It’s an amazing idea to collaborate with wearable products as possible.
• People love competing or comparing themselves to others – so do offer them this opportunity.
• Finally, the app should offer a custom workout plan creation functionality.

So, before you start building a fitness app, pay attention to your app’s USP that makes people feel motivated to use your app and share a word socially. 

Finally, to develop your own fitness app, it’s recommended to choose the best partner for mobile app development in Dubai that are as passionate as you are for your project.

Indeed, this approach will help you save money and also test out the idea without spending vast resources and efforts.