Fitness apps are the rage nowadays. Staying fit and healthy has become a necessity. People go to great lengths to stay healthy and try to make their fitness routine as holistic and all-encompassing as possible. Now, fitness is not limited to physical exercise and diet but has extended to mental wellness and smart nutrition.
In this modern age of digitization and rapid technological advancement, it is very typical that people, especially youngsters, use various fitness apps to maintain their health. They expect an all-around fitness app that will help them stay fit and keep them updated regularly on the latest status of their health. They would like to learn how many steps they walked, how many calories they lost, etc.
Considering the increasing pressure of fitness apps’ expectations, it falls upon the developers to keep these in mind and create new, innovative features to meet the demand. Riseapps, in the article on how to develop a fitness app, name three reasons why the industry is growing. These are insurance costs, eating habits change, and people’s need to monitor their health. Let’s discuss these reasons in more detail.
Reasons behind the rising demand
As we mentioned in the previous passage, there are three reasons for the growing demand in the fitness app development industry:
- It has been noticed that insurance costs tend to fall substantially for people who concentrate on fitness since it takes less to insure them. Many employers readily cover the costs of their employees as long as they visit gyms routinely.
- Another noticeable change is that people are now preferring healthier cooked food over processed food for a healthier lifestyle. Most people prefer to depend on nutrition apps for perfect guidance.
- Instead of going to the clinic or the doctor every time for check-ups, most people have started using fitness apps. These allow them to check heartbeats, pulse rates, and other health stats to ensure that everything is fine. Also, it reduced the number of devices people use at home to monitor their health.
This has resulted in the growing importance of fitness apps in daily life.
Types of fitness apps
Suppose you are in the ideation stage to develop a fitness app. In that case, it is crucial, at the very beginning, to decide what kind of app you wish to build. In this regard, it is essential to discuss the three types of fitness app designs which are available:
1. Workout applications
Physical exercises are still considered to be the best way to sweat and lose weight, and in turn, stay fit. Instead of going to the gym every day, on busy days, and especially during the pandemic, people prefer to follow their fitness routine at home. Workout apps with built-in workout plans and exercises have become very popular in this regard.
2. Nutrition and dieting applications
These apps are beneficial to those looking at a healthier and better lifestyle through a controlled diet. These apps provide detailed plans- daily diet charts with low-calorie healthy food, and a lot of roughage- depending upon the user’s weight loss goals.
3. Activity tracking apps
These apps collect data from the daily life of a person. They can provide information about the heartbeat, pulse rate, the number of steps walked a day, calories lost, etc. That information gives the user a general idea about your health status.
Fitness applications features
Features to be incorporated into your fitness application:
For a workout app
- It should have plans in different time frames- daily, weekly, monthly.
- It should have plans at different levels- basic, intermediate, and advanced.
- It should have a provision to set a fixed time for daily practice.
- It should have an alarm to remind the user of time for exercise.
- It should have a mechanism to show the stats after the daily workout- the weight loss, the calories burned, energy used, etc.
- It should have a system of graph calculation to show the week wise or month-wise activity and improvement.
- Users should have the option of customizing the plans according to their goals.
- There should be a mechanism to make users understand if they are being able to achieve their fitness goals or not.
For a Nutrition app
- It should have diet plans in different time frames- however, the most lenient diet plan should not be ineffective, neither should the most rigid plan be too hard to follow.
- There should be plans for vegetarian, non-vegetarian, and vegan users.
- There should be timely reminders for every meal, including the ingredients that are supposed to be present in that meal.
- There should be a mechanism to inform users about the expected and the achieved outcome after completing a diet plan.
- Daily tips provided in the app as pop-ups for a healthy lifestyle would be a perfect bonus.
For an activity tracking app
- Different sections should track various activities- like heart rate, pulse rate, footsteps, etc.
- There should be a provision to set a limit for each activity, on crossing which the user should get a reminder from the app.
- Daily tips provided in the app as pop-ups for a healthy lifestyle would be a pleasant bonus.
As you see, fitness app development is a great idea. It is caught by many health and fitness professionals not only to share health tips with their current consumers but also to widen their audience and increase profit.