From running away from Zombies to running after Pokemon, the users are becoming more than avid gamers. The majority of people today are using these apps to shed their weight, live a healthier life and get a perfect figure to flaunt in a swimming suit – and that also without spending a huge amount of money in getting gym memberships and adjusting their daily routines.

According to Flurry statistics, the health and fitness apps have become significantly popular in the past few years. A rise by 330% has been recorded in the adoption of fitness apps in last three years. Besides, it has been observed that users are accessing these applications at least twice a week and at most 10 times a week. And with the advent of wearables like fitness bands, the users are becoming more motivated to use these applications for enjoying their lives healthier. This, as a whole, has driven the demand for fitness apps like Fitbit.

If you belong to the fitness industry, this is a call for you to invest in fitness application development and leverage huge benefits from this lucrative opportunity. But before you begin with, you must be familiar with the features that can make your app popular like Fitbit app, about which we will discuss in this blog.

Features Your Fitness App Must Have

There are different types of fitness mobile applications – there are weight loss apps, nutrition and diet apps, on-demand personal trainer apps, exercising and workout apps, and so on. To decide the features, you must determine the type of app you want to develop firstly. However, the following can be considered as the basic features that can be included in all the types of application:

Account Creation

As fitness apps are for serving individuals, personal account creation is the foremost feature to consider. The end users must be facilitated with the opportunity to have an individual account where they can feed their personal data, choose all the elements/facilities they want, and track their journey conveniently.
It is advisable to keep the profile creation process simple and seamless. The process should not be time-consuming and complicated. The best way to provide effective account creation services is to let the users sign up not only by email, but also by using social media credentials. This will ease the process while helping you to gather the required information and use.
Apart from this, if you are designing a fitness application with subscription options, let users store billing information and pay easily via payment gateway integrated into your mobile application.

Social Media Sharing

Who doesn’t like to brag about his achievements on social media platforms? We all do it, right? Because of the same reason, social media sharing should be in your fitness application feature checklist. When the users could share their goals and achievements within the app, they will feel good about using the app and do ‘word of mouth’ marketing. Besides, people in their social media networks will come to know about your app and look forward to using it, which means cost-effective brand awareness and marketing.

Design

While designing a fitness app, the mobile app developers must ensure the simplicity, usability and interactivity. The design of the app must not be confused or the procedure must not be time-consuming as it would affect the user’s interest. The clickable and minimalistic icons should be considered for adding to the home screen so that the user could easily reach the different sections. The screen must be presented in the form of a sheet to help users easily find what they have done, what they are doing and what they have to do so as to achieve their target. The app should be interactive, gesture-focused and based on the color psychology, i.e., calm colors must be added to generate positive energy.

Personalization/Setting Targets

Every user has different body features, needs and expectations. Providing them with the same fitness course won’t be favorable. So, it is vital to facilitate them with the service of personalization. Let them set their own targets and timeline, decide which exercise/activity they want to practice and when, what supplements they will intake during this course, and so on. When fitness apps provide personalized features, users tend to be more consistent, and thus, the app goes viral.

Apart from this, you can also add VR technology into your application – allowing smartphone users to create a VR fitness room and workout in groups.

Notification System

A missed workout can hamper the user’s enthusiasm as well as interaction with your application. So, it is vital for every fitness app development company to invest in the notification system. With a perfect notification system, you can prompt users to use your applications regularly. Besides, it can provide you extensive know-how with which you can understand the user behavior and deliver a better experience. However, bear in mind not to push too many notifications that annoy users (the frustrated users would definitely leave your application for never returning back).

Gamification

Music in the gym and fitness stations make losing calories more a fun, right? What if you could get the same feel in a mobile application? With the concept of gamification, you can easily add fun elements to your app processing, making it more engaging. By incorporating different elements like Badges, Rewards, Leaderboards, and Progress bar, you can increase the user acquisition and retention rate.

Geolocation and Wearable Integration

If you are developing an outdoor fitness app, these two technologies are must to integrate into your application development process. Geolocation functionality will let the user know the path, traffic and minimal time required for going through the track. It will also help them to track the user activities such as no. of steps taken, cycling, swimming, etc. With this data collected using GPS, you can easily calculate and share the insights gained, because of which the users would start appreciating your application.

While integrating your app into wearables like smartwatches and bracelets will empower you to monitor user’s steps, heartbeat rate, pulse rate in real-time and provide valuable advice using these insights.
Tip: There are various public APIs and developer’s kit for integrating wearables into your fitness app, like Misfit, Garmin Wellness and Pebble. Determine which one is apt for your app processing and look forward to using it.

Chat Feature

With a chat feature, users will be able to interact with a team of fitness experts and get the best-customized solutions related to their health and fitness concerns. Besides, the users will be able to interact with other fitness freaks and create daily challenges based on their potential and needs. This way, the chat feature will boost user engagement and app success ratio.

Audio/Video Guide

Amp the workout experience with an audio/video guide. A guide, just like an instructor, will help the fitness application users to understand the right way to do exercise and workout. This will lessen the risk of injuries due to inappropriate postures, boost their experience and motivate them to perform exercises daily.

Activity Log

Recording the daily interaction of the app with the user is also a crucial factor to consider while designing a health and fitness mobile application. The recorded stats inform fitness freaks how much calories they have reduced and how much time is it required to reach their decided goal. This supercharges them to be more active and workout religiously.

Tip: To speed up the development process and cut down the cost, employ Google Fit APIs and HealthKit to access health and fitness related data.

Data Security

Remember the data breach case of Strava app? The app aggregated the US military men sensitive information to provide personalized fitness and workout services. However, shared the information publicly without their consent. This incident has turned the smartphone users more conscious about the security and privacy policies of the mobile applications they use, which implies you need to work on the data privacy and security aspect.
Optimize your app performance and ensure that there’s no data leakage point so as to win the trust of mobile users and prompt them to use your application. Also, make it certain that your app follows the guidelines of HIPAA and other such health privacy compliances.

Multi-device synchronization

Just like Fitbit, you can also embed multi-device synchronization feature in your application. This feature will be highly appreciated when the user does not have the synchronized fitness tracker but want to workout. Allowing them to sync another device will make it easier for them to practice religiously and reap the benefits. This will boost customer loyalty.

Reviews

The reviews section is of utmost importance to both the users and developers. By collecting feedbacks, the developers can easily find out what challenges users are facing while using the app, what are the glitches in the fitness application and how can they work on improving the customer experience.

Apart from the aforementioned key features, you can also look forward to implementing the following features in your Health & fitness app development process:

Calorie Burn and Diet Tracking

To supercharge the user enthusiasm and motivate them to stick to your fitness application, you can also add calorie burn and diet tracking section. This feature will assist fitness freaks in determining the right meal for them and achieve their desired goals faster.

Meditation and Yoga course

To overcome the anxiety, fear and other negative emotions while using your app, you can add meditation and yoga courses into the app. These practices will calm down their mind and body, and boost their participation in fitness exercises and workouts.

Now, as you know the features that could make your fitness app popular and useful as Fitbit, take no time to plan the process and invest in the development process. If you already have the plan ready but are confused at the costing, Appinventiv team would love to assist you. Our experts will understand your market needs and suggest the best tech stacks to include in your development project along with outlining the cost to build a fitness application.

 

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