How to Create a Fitness App: A Step by Step Guide

Fitness is important for human beings to do daily activities like aerobics, muscle and bone strengthening, flexibility, balance, and other activities depending upon their ability. Although it rehabs their physical and mental sickness, for now, using technologies to track physical activity progress by using fitness tracking mobile apps is a hyper-trend in the world market. Accordingly, most leading tech companies have already entered into this fitness app technology to engage in it.

If you are an entrepreneur looking to create a fitness app in 2024, then this complete guide on Fitness app development is all you need. 

Let's get started on how to create your own Fitness app. 

What is a Fitness App?

A fitness app is a mobile app that tracks fitness activities like indoor and outdoor exercise, yoga, and other activity metrics. Additionally, the fitness app is capable of tracking SpO2, heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, and stress monitoring. It allows users to set a predetermined fitness goal and helps them encourage and achieve it to maintain and care about their health. Also, the fitness app works interoperably on multiple devices, like smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches.

Why Build Your Own Fitness App?

There are a lot of reasons to build your own fitness app for business reasons. We list out the top reasons, such as 

Offer a Unique Value Proposition

If you have offered unique value to your audience in that way, you can build an innovative fitness mobile app to stand out in the competitive fitness mobile app market.

Meet Market Demands

From the pandemic to now, the fitness app market has been booming. The cause is that people should concentrate themselves on health and wellness. So entrepreneurs should focus on filling the gap in demands for features in fitness apps.

Collect Data and Insights

Collecting valuable user data to know fitness trends and user behavior that helps to improve your app or other business ventures

Build a Community

To foster your community, you’ll get a larger user base, and you can use it to implement subscription plans to offer feature-rich personalized fitness training options for your community users using your fitness app.

Current Fitness App Market

The recent fitness market data stats revealed from statista are projected to reach US$ 6.86 billion by this year 2024, and that's an annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2028) of 9.99%, which means that by the year 2028 it is expected to reach US$ 10.04 billion. 

In 2024, globally, which countries have placed their ranking in the fitness app revenue hold? According to these results, the US is in the top position, taking in US$20601 million; China is in the second position with US$1077 million; Japan is in the third position with US$276.30 million; and India is in the first position with US$267.70 million. 

In the middle of wondering about business opportunities and striving to attract young entrepreneurs, that data attracts them to invest in this business.

Types of Fitness Apps

If you are an entrepreneur looking to create your own fitness app, then you must know about the types of fitness apps available in the market

Activity Tracker Apps

This activity tracker app's role is to monitor and motivate the health and wellness of the tracking user’s daily activities, like steps, exercise insights, calories burned data, sleep data, and a lot more. Using these activity tracker apps can leverage the user's activity data by using GPS and accelerometer sensors to measure the user's distance covered, speed, pace, and recovery time and analyze their routine. 

Although these apps use smartphone sensors or wearable device sensors to give exact data. Some leading brands also have their own proprietary activity tracker apps, such as Google Fit, Apple Health, Samsung Health, Strava, MyFitnessPal, MapMyRun, Adidas Running, etc.

Workout & Exercise Apps

As far as workout apps are concerned, they suggest personalized workouts, video tutorials, and workout demonstrations. These workout and fitness apps integrate with tracking smartphone devices, smartwatches, smart scales, and other smart devices to give a holistic fitness data overview of the user's progress. 

Some gamification techniques boost the workout app user in such ways as providing goal rewards, badges, progress bars, and top leaderboards. Hereafter, some workout apps monitor water intake and track calories. Are you a sports and fitness-centric person looking for tailored-made specific fitness goals and a pro-level person? This app is suitable for you.

Nutrition and Diet Apps

Most fitness mobile apps have a dedicated nutrition and diet segment for their app users. Exercise does not only impact the human body to get fit or gain weight; apart from that, nutrition and diet also play a major role in fitness. 

This app collects your nutrition data for some propositions, such as body weight, intake of water, and eating habits. That data is derived to give you a personalized meal plan for your balanced diet.

We list out how the nutrition apps collect users’ data in what type of ways, like

1. This app permits users to easily enter their food consumption data.

2. To track packed food items, enter data by scanning product barcode or snapping a product calorie chart.

3. Eventually if you track your food-eating habits for a week, this app will give a tailored meal plan for your health and nutrition gain or deficit.

4. Track your water consumption using smart water bottles or track the same from your smartwatch.

5. Give suggestions for recipes and switch to another type of meals.

Social Fitness Apps

Connect your friends, family, and colleagues with this app to track their physical activity performance, be intuitive, and strive to motivate each other. Share your connected member's updates, progress, and motivational messages All of these get 24*7. However, participate in new types of challenges and stay engaged with your connection.

Balanced Exercise Apps

This category includes users who find a sense of peace through meditation, yoga, and Zumba. This app focuses on guiding people toward calm and wellness through audio and video-based types of yoga and meditation classes. Suggest workout plans and also give live sessions for the users.

Features of Fitness App

Every health and fitness app delicately sprinkles a lot of features depending on the market size. We list out some prominent features of fitness apps, such as

Authorization features

If you create your fitness app, that app has a must-have feature to sync user’s data to sign up or log in via social platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or email. The reason is that you upload the user data to the cloud server to retrieve the user information at any time from your platform. To incorporate this feature to track your user activity and give personalized suggestions to your app users.

User Profile

To store your user data like weight, age, height, fitness level, and other inputs. All of this data is used to generate personalized workout plans and give interpretive suggestions for meal plans. Fitness app users can track their workout progress and completed exercises through this app.

Notifications and Reminders

This fitness app notifies you and makes you motivated by sending it daily or periodically. This way, you get to reap in-app rewards and access early features Also, that gives you notifications of upcoming expert training live streams and video sessions to amplify your workout community.

Goal Setting

These physical activity criteria goal setting include sleep quality tracking, hydration tracking, and other ways of goal setting in-depth by time frame, difficulty, etc. That goal-setting data will be used to get your data and analyze your progress in the day, week, or nutrition ratio.

User Activity Tracking

Fitness apps get user activity tracking from smartphone sensors like accelerometers and GPS, which can automatically detect body actions while walking. 

This is one type of activity tracking parallel to be utilized with wearables to measure the extra amount of activities such as sleep monitoring, heart rate, SpO2, stress monitoring, calorie burning, and the overall calculation of daily activities. If needed, the fitness app creator can add third-party APIs that connect to the app with wearables.

Geolocation-based Tracking

Leverage this technology to track your cycling, walking, running, jogging, and a lot more activities by using GPS technology to map your activity through this fitness app.

Fitness App Menu

A fitness app shows different types of menus, and features are combined with them. On this menu, you can see the exact data of calories burned, an ECG graph, a stress monitoring graph, and a body temperature, as well as a demonstration of exercise in the format of photos, videos, 3D animation, or a description.

3rd Party Device Connectivity

To make your fitness application more usable and attract a lot of app users by allowing third-party devices and APIs of your application. Potentially, you offer a lot of device connectivity support, like multiple-way usage of trackers, smartwatches, smart scales, and other devices to collect different body activities.

Progress Statistics

The total data statistics added up to more motivation for your app users, making them easily accountable for their fitness journey. It is visually appealing to view fitness goals and achieve milestones in the form of graphs, charts, and other forms of animated visual immersion.

Social Features

The fitness mobile app feature directly shares your fitness progress with your friends and always keeps you accountable. These features also convey the ability to convert new users into your fitness network. Additionally, the fitness app creates customized posts while your fitness progress is shared.

How to Create a Fitness App?

If you are actively looking to make a fitness app, then here is the step-by-step process to create a fitness app,

1. Identifying your niche and target audience

2. Defining App Purpose & Features

3. Choosing Programming languages and frameworks

4. User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI) Design

5. Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

6. Backend Development

7. Integration with relevant APIs

8. Testing & Refinement

9. Deployment

Step 1: Identifying your Niche and Target Audience

Every entrepreneur must prepare his niche and select his targeted audience before kickstarting a new business. Now you choose your nice audience for meditations or heavy-demand workout apps. Each of the fitness apps must have unique features and functionality that differ from those of other market players. 

However, side-by-side figure out your business ideas so they're fit for your targeted audience and make them suitable for real life.

Step 2: Defining App Purposes and Features

As far as the fitness app market goes, a lot of players are already doing well and sustainingly serving their services in the fitness industry in prolonged. Take a discussion meeting with your tech and market research teams to frame and solidify features of your core fitness app in user personals, business personals, and the future of the customer journey to define your app features and purposes. So that you can compete by introducing some unique selling point features or availing of no other platform features to incorporate into your app.

Step 3: Choosing Programming Languages and Frameworks

Before you choose the programming language and Mobile app development frameworks, you must consider core functionalities, USP, and user needs. However, be ready for your fitness app to be supported by future technology and to have all the essential features you need.

Step 4: User Experience and User Interface Design

Secondly, give a wholesome look and feel to the design and interface of your fitness mobile app because it ensures that your users will keep consistently trusting it while using it in the long run. That user rate is simultaneously increasing as you finally release and test trail-based features in the future.

Step 5: Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

MVP is the first beta version of your fitness app. These version-based apps generally establish core app features only, so you can save time initially incorporating so many of the features and finally testing them. 

During that time, your quality testers will qualify your app, and you will be ready to release the initially built version in the Google Play Store or App Store. To gather customer feedback and bugs to rectify your fitness app at the correct time.

Step 6: Backend Development

Now code all the functionalities of the app Integrate your both developed front-end and back-end without compromising security issues, glitches, and bugs. 

Step 7: Integration with Relevant APIs

It's not easy to get a final result out of your fitness app with these steps. Additionally, you may be integrating relevant APIs into your platform, such as 

1. Google Maps API 

2. Apple MapKit APIs

3. Nutritionix Restaurant Geolocation API

4. Mapbox API

5. Can I Eat API

6. Chomp Food & Nutrition Database API

7. Edamam Nutrition Analysis API

8. Food Data Central API

9. Apple Healthkit API 

10. Fitbit Web API

11. Human API

12. Garmin Health API

13. In-App Chat API

14. In-App Audio & Video Calling API

All of these APIs depend on your selected platform and needed features.

Step 8: Testing & Refinement

However, take a necessary final test, and if your fitness app passes overall testing, then you are ready to use your fitness app for your audience. At this stage, if you need refinement of your fitness app, then take your time to optimize it.

Step 9: Deployment

The last and foremost stage is the deployment of your fitness app in the public market. If your fitness app passes all of the security measures, it is ready to release the public build version for your app users.

Monetization Strategies for Fitness App Development

A lot of monetization strategies are bundled up with fitness app development. Here, we list out the top monetization strategies as they

Freemium Model

The freemium model is a concept to avail basic versions of app features for free and limited features and functionalities. If you get an extra feature, you’ll upgrade to the premium version on a one-time purchase or subscription basis. This model includes ad-free, personalized coaching, and workout plans. This method is effective in attracting a larger user base and potentially converting users into paying customers.

Subscription Model

This plan requires a recurring fee, either monthly, quarterly, or annually, to unlock the full features and content. It also includes personalized training, premium workouts, an ad-free experience, well-detailed and accurate analytics, and unlocking exclusive communities. This plan benefited by generating a predictable revenue stream and motivating long-term user engagement.

Advertising

This strategy pushes intrusive ads while using fitness apps in certain sections, like banners, out-stream ads, and native ads. These ads are shown without interpreting the user experience. Through this advertising practice, the platform owner may partner up with relevant brands and companies in the fitness industry and ensure ads show up depending on the user's interest.

In-App Purchases

This methodology's motive is to buy or sell physical or virtual goods within the same app. Which includes nutrition items, gym gear, and other items. However, users can unlock training plans, and nutrition tips through these in-app purchases.

Affiliate Partnerships

To build partnerships with fitness brands to promote their product or services through the fitness app for example: nutrition supplements, apparel, branded gym equipment, etc. 

By utilizing this method, you can earn commissions for each sale through your app. Adopting this technique to promote useful products or services for your app users.

The Future of Fitness App Development

The future of Fitness app development entirely depends upon leveraging new technologies like AI, machine learning, AR, VR, etc. So undoubtedly, fitness app market growth will skyrocket in the future because a lot of fitness app users are continuously adopting fitness apps into their day-to-day lifestyles. 

According to the Statista report, 44% of global smartphone users use health and fitness apps As of February 2024, more than 230,000 health and fitness apps are available in Apple’s App Store, and from the Google Play Store, there are more than  970,000 fitness and healthcare apps.

Why Choose Appticz to Create your Fitness App?

Currently, fitness app competition has drastically risen, and a lot of startups and leading players have entered the market. In this competition, Appticz is one of the most proficient mobile app development companies, especially in fitness app development services and other types of mobile app development services. Use this opportunity to expand your business venture with the Best Fitness application development company.