A few years back, fitness became a new religion for people across the globe. Looking at the mass interest, the creators’ in-app world began to come with fitness tracking apps.
In no time people got numerous tech innovations, including fitness tracking band and other fitness mobility solutions. But…
Types of Fitness Apps
Mainly, there are three types of fitness tracking apps viz. Nutrition Apps, Workout apps and Activity tracking apps. Let us now look at three major types of fitness apps that are playing a major role in redefining fitness tracking technology:
Workout and exercise apps
Workout mobile applications provide the information of exercise to the users, which they need to do. Apart from this, workout apps guide the users on how to exercise properly.
Logbook apps, personal trainer app and device pairing fitness apps are some popular examples of workout applications.
Personal trainer apps offer a set of tailormade exercises by enabling the user to choose the difficulty level and the type of exercises that they like the most. Logbook apps are used to track exercise progress or health condition changes.
If you use a fitness bracelet or smartwatch, you can get all your health data right over your smartphone thanks to the robust fitness features.
Nutrition apps
Nutrition apps measure different health indicators such as height, weight, calories, water balance, etc. in order to ensure that people maintain a healthy diet.
Apart from this, such apps also monitor your daily coffee consumption and body fat content with the help of light sensors. They will also create a shopping list and draw up recipes in order to provide healthier lifestyles.
Activity tracking apps
Generally, this type of apps is mostly preferred by athletes or sports freaks. The activity tracking app consists of multiple optical sensors to calculate the completed steps and calories burned during the exercise.
Also, these activity apps can track your sleep and assess your sleep quality. You can also take help of a digital alarm to make your waking up easy and quick. Furthermore, these apps offer your the voice control feature too.
How many made their way into the hearts of the people?
We all are well aware of the status of the flooded app world. The arena has the same number of contributions from fitness app developers, but not all find their way to the shore.
The major reason behind this is understanding of the need of the target audience (fitness enthusiasts) by the fitness app developers to serve them with additional features and benefits.
As per Statista, there will be 86.3 million (approx.) fitness and healthcare app users in the United States only. With the increase of the COVID-19 virus, more and more people became health-conscious than ever before.
According to eMarketer, the number of fitness app users are estimated at over 84 million by 2022. Even the fitness app market will touch 14.64 billion (approx.) by the year 2027, as estimated by GlobalNewswire.
An outer look at the above data reveals that the primary reason behind the trend of fitness tracking apps is the awareness and motivation. However, it’s better that we won’t jump to a conclusion directly and go through all the linked aspects of fitness app development.
How to create an activity tracking app to make it successful?
When we talk about an activity tracker app, wearable market steps in. While building fitness apps, one needs to ensure that they are well compatible with wearable devices.
A recent report reveals that the wearable market has increased drastically in the last couple of years.
However, the question arises, how many made it to the end? Or rather, how many made it as they dreamt/planned?
I guess not many.
Here are some tips that as a fitness tracker app developer you need to keep in mind, during the process of fitness app development:
1. A personalized experience
When it’s about tracking the user’s daily activity and further evaluating the user’s fitness, the application needs to have user’s personal information like, age, height, gender, and weight.
These will help the application in ascertaining the accurate details.
With these, allow users to customize the application as per their need. You may include essential features like:
- Making user profiles
- Planning personalized exercise routines
- Saving the statistics he/she gets
- Setting goals
- Comparing the performance/progress
2. Customized Diet Plans
Customized diet plans are tailored as per your specific energy consumption needs. Also, a customized diet is designed just for you. So if you have any preferences, food intolerances, specific requirements, or food allergies, they are all taken into consideration. You will be more likely to stick to a plan that includes the kinds of foods you enjoy.
With customized diet plans, you can effortlessly avoid the pitfalls that come with simply browsing through the market with no obvious intention or purpose.
That’s why the shopping list and recipes that come along with a customized diet plan are so helpful. They save you time by making the planning and shopping experience easier and more purposeful for you.
Read More: A complete guide to develop a diet & nutrition app
3. Nutrition Tracking
Nutrition is the core of every fitness activity. There are many nutrition tracking apps available in the market that allow your users to control their weight by providing them with the data of burned calories, controlling water balance and motivating the users to encourage healthy food habits.
Personal goal setting is one of the basic features of fitness apps. If a person is facing trouble with the time sticking to healthy nutrition, the app will help to create grocery shopping lists and even collect healthy food recipes.
4. Integrate geolocation
This feature allows the user to track his walking routes, and to build them and record workouts.
By availing this platform your fitness tracking app can make an invincible space in the hearts of its users, as this will allow them to track their fitness progression over larger periods of time.
5. Push notification system & reminders
Anyone who is working out regularly would never want to miss a session. However, keeping up with our busy lives; sometimes, it does slips out of our minds. In such cases, a push notification from the app can be very useful to remind us of our workout session.
This is the very reason why many Fitness app development companies are investing a lot of capital and time in the notification system. However, they must keep one thing in mind: Push Notifications work as a double-edged sword.
Pushing the Push Notifications too much could annoy your users; they even might leave your app to never return.
6. Gamification
We all have pushed five crunches or pushups the moment gym plays our favorite song. Moreover, we tend to push ourselves more whenever there is a target to achieve.
Just imagine what if you can complete these targets and win rewards which is a part of a game in your fitness app?
This game will have several tasks which you have to complete. Failing to complete these tasks would lead to penalties. These penalties could be in a form exercise like 250 burpees or in the monetary form.
7. Social Sharing
Who doesn’t like to brag about his achievements on social network? In the era of social media platforms, it is tough to imagine fitness apps without social media integration.
Customers often prefer to share their achievements with others on social media. This makes them more fulfilled and motivated to push themselves to work out more.
And that is why fitness apps enable individuals to share their daily fitness progress, chat with near and dear ones, and group-based interaction will allow the users to spend a good amount of their time over fitness tracking apps.
Besides this, fitness apps are integrated with third-party apps of social media to make content sharing smoother.
8. Multi-device synchronization
Like Fitbit, you can allow your fitness app to synchronize with different mobile devices. This feature will give your app an extra edge as it will get the nod of those users who wants to work out by synchronizing their devices.
So, the mobile app development firms while they build an app must consider this point very significantly.
9. Goal Setting
Fitness apps are aimed at helping users to bring measurable results from their daily workouts. The user sets the desired results themselves, so the process of goal setting should be simple and clear.
Besides this, fitness apps also focus on sports activities and nutritional goal settings. For effective utilisation of fitness apps, the user needs to select a daily task, input goal value, or you can decide a specific date to achieve the goal. Furthermore, the fitness apps show the task performance statistics.
10. Progress Tracking
You cannot able to achieve your fitness goals properly unless you do not measure its progress. Repetitions, sets, calories, hours, kilometres, kilograms, pounds – everything can be counted.
The app owners can track their progress in the aforesaid measurable units, become motivated by this information, and continue using the app to achieve more.
The most important thing here is that fitness apps do not track unnecessary amounts of data to avoid data overload. A graphical overview of the metrics provides the entire fitness routine summary to the user at their fingertips, including the route map with the colour codes showing the most active segments.
11. Deep heart monitoring
For many years doctors, athletes, and astronauts are using heart rate monitors to measure stress and other health metrics. Nowadays, a majority of fitness apps use optical heart rate monitors.
Welltory is a mobile app which helps its users to measure their heart rate variability at any time and anywhere.
It provides its users with the best heart rate monitoring & diagnostics results with 33 stats. These stats are personalized and explained in detail.
12. Sleep tracker
This is must add feature looking at today’s busy lifestyles. The feature tracks the time user didn’t get the sound sleep. This implies the moments he is active during sleep.
To use this feature in the fitness tracking wearable, the individual will have to wear the band and activate it before going to sleep. Hence, to get this thing to work well, you might need a little extra discipline to have a healthy lifestyle in return.
Read More: Fitness mobile apps can help in improving your fitness
13. Altimeter
This feature is useful for the users who climb stairs instead of going with an escalator or a wheelchair. The feature measures the stairs climbed and the change in height (altitude).
This feature is also helpful during jogging or running, in order to measure the efforts made and the final result ascertained.
14. Food tracker
By adding this feature you’ll allow app users to log their food intake. This will help them in the realtime tracking of their calorie intake and the exact requirement as per their body.
The integration motivates and guides the user, and thus has an impeccable space in the market.
15. Water tracker
The water tracker is a unique feature which is certain to get green signal from most of the users. Fitness trackers can include it and take its advantage. Water is a very essential yet neglected element of our diet.
We all know the fact roughly 60% of our body is water. A human body requires 2-3 liters of water in a day.
This app reminds the user to drink water and stay hydrated during different stages of a day. It considerably helps in assisting the user to achieve their goals by ensuring proper intake of water in their body.
16. Online consultation & chat
Physical exercise often becomes tricky in absence of a trainer. The user may have plethora of queries regarding different exercises. In such cases an online consultation & chat feature can really help your users.
They can clear any of their query at any time through online consultation. Moreover, with the chat system in place they can talk with the fellow work out buddies and can share their experiences and progress.
17. Live Streaming or Video-on-Demand
A fitness application caters to a diverse range of users that prefer to access multiple information on a platform. For those who want to access visual information, the app can implement video tutorials that show the techniques for specific workouts.
Furthermore, these videos are also motivating and contain music that cheers up the users.
SWEAT, Grokker, ClassPass, Physique 57, TRX Workout app, etc are some of the popular fitness applications.
18. Tracking Number of Steps Taken
Steps tracking is a must-have feature for startups who want to create an app that helps users with their workout tracking. With this feature of a fitness tracker application, users can check their total steps of an entire day and calories burned while doing different fitness activities like walking, running, and cycling.
Conclusion
With time people have understood the importance of physical fitness and this awareness turned into a modern fad or craze will continue for years to come. This segment has a promising future in the form of tech-savvy tools like development sensor, switch control and digital atmospheric pressure meters.
Being a visionary entrepreneur, you must cash in this opportunity; you can contact any mobile app development firm and discuss the cost of app development including the hourly rates and all the mentioned advanced features.
Moreover, you can conduct market research and contemplate adding some key features which will make you stand out from the existing fitness apps.
So, the key ingredients to make a successful app is wise strategy and an app with standout features.
