From fitness freaks to professionals trying to find a work-life balance, these days, fitness apps are popular among people for several reasons. Whether a web or a mobile app, people find digital means more effective for tracking their fitness and health parameters more often. Particularly, mobile fitness apps with real-time tracking features allow people to track their exercises and physical workouts never before.
app developers uk have been particularly active with their impressive fitness apps, and many of these apps have several key features common with many mobile apps for health and wellness. We provide a comprehensive guide if you want to build a great fitness app that becomes instantly popular among fitness mavericks and enthusiasts.
Step-by-Step Guide to Build A Fitness App
According to experienced app developers, building a fitness app that stands apart from the competition with a unique user experience and feature set is difficult. As John Lennon of Imperioit says, “since fitness apps have become ubiquitous, you need to have a strategy to deliver a unique user experience. Otherwise, your chances to grab user attention are very low.” Keeping this principle in mind, we will provide a detailed step-by-step guide to developing a fitness app.
Make a detailed analysis of competitors.
There are numerous fitness apps in the market and hundreds of them. Naturally, you need to find something unique that will make your app engaging and attention-grabbing from the very beginning.
This requires analyzing your competitor apps and all particularities such as features, design, target platforms, reviews, ratings, etc. You can find customer feedback on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Thanks to this competitor research, you can easily get a comprehensive idea of the strengths and weaknesses of other leading apps in the niche. Thus, you can figure out a plan to stand apart from the competition.
Make an analysis of target users.
To get a comprehensive idea of who will use your app, you can again look at the urs of competitor apps. Based on this idea, you can find similar audiences across social channels, fitness and wellness forums, etc.
Dig into their shared and public content and comments and try to define their personal characteristics, habits, and attitudes. These will help you create a user persona that fits your audience’s character and characteristics.
Shape the App Design
When the app idea is crystallized, and you have done the competition and user research, it is to shape the app’s user interface design. The UI design needs to be shaped through wireframing, mock-ups, and dynamic prototyping.
First, draw the basic layout of the app screens either by using a pen and paper or by using any of the wireframe tools available in the market. In the next step, add more detailed design elements based on the style guide or platform-specific design guidelines. This will be the mock-up of the app design. In the end, you need to use a good prototyping tool to add interactive elements to the static design mock-up and come up with the final app prototype offering a complete look and feel of the finished product.
Start MVP development
The minimum viable product or MVP is an incremental development approach that allows an app project to start with a basic set of features defining the core functionality while keeping options open for further value additions.
Apart from reducing the initial development cost, this also ensures that you build the app based on user feedback, so there are the least errors and resource-consuming course corrections. This also helps release the app faster and feting a credible app for review to the investors.
QA testing
Simultaneously during development, developers run automation tests to detect and get rid of errors and bugs. In the end, before the app is released, QA testers subject the app to rigorous tests for evaluating code quality, user experience, performance and scalability, security risks, etc.
App release
In the end, the app is launched or released in the market with some prior pre-launch campaigns and buzz creations. The launch event should always coincide with significant dates or events your audience easily connects with.
Key Fitness App Features
Top-notch fitness apps that are already popular in the market have some common features, and you cannot reinvent the wheel here apart from adding a couple of additional features that users may or may not find useful. Here below, we describe these features.
- Registration user profile
Fitness apps are very personal; hence, to make the experience personal and protect user information, you enforce strong registration and authentication processes besides allowing them to create expressive profiles.
- Workouts
One of the core features will be a workout section describing and guiding different types of workouts with an expressive and elaborate menu.
- GPS map
As far as workout and fitness are concerned, people, through apps, track the distance covered while running or cycling, which is why geolocation is always a non-negotiable feature for these apps.
- Real-time activity tracking
The activity tracking feature through device sensors keeps track of movements, distances, and timing and accordingly shows the results. This is an elementary feature of fitness apps.
The development cost of a fitness app
Determining the cost of building a fitness app involves many considerations, including features, complexity, development timing, target platform, methodology, developer resources and location, and many others. But if you keep these factors under control and go for an MVP development approach, you can release your first fitness app version for $20,000 to $30,000.
Closing thoughts
The fitness app market is extremely competitive, but because of exponential demand, a new app with balanced features and a unique user experience still has the chance to stand out. Given this app niche’s popularity, it is at least worth trying.
