How to Create a Fitness App: Process, Costs, Estimates and Challenges

Fitness Tracking Apps

Fitness monitoring app, which tracks physical activities, and measures and compute a user's daily steps, exercise, caloric expenditure, sleep patterns, and other parameters, are essential in the fitness app market. These applications can record user behavior by utilizing:

• Geolocation which tracks travel and calculates distance, pace, and speed;
• An accelerometer measures your gait while you running or walking and counts the steps you take.

Fitbit and Apple Health are notable examples, offering comprehensive activity tracking and health monitoring features. If you're wondering about the cost to develop an app like Fitbit, you can take a look at our recent guide.

Looking to create a fitness tracking app? Explore our detailed guide for tips and costs!

Fitness Center App

This app, often referred to as a fitness member mobile app solution, caters to specific fitness centers or gyms, providing individuals with customized experiences that include gym resources, class schedules, and activity tracking.

PerfectGym is a popular choice, offering diet tracking alongside gym activity monitoring.

Workout Apps

When you build a fitness app for workouts, you're creating a solution that serves as a virtual personal trainer, offering a range of exercises and workout routines. In this type of application, a person can find ready-made workouts like Full Body, Upper Body, Core Strength, Lower Back, or even customize a specific workout, learn more about the technique of performing an exercise, or watch a video tutorial.

Nike Training Club and Planet Fitness are successful examples, providing users with a variety of workouts for different fitness levels.

We have extensive experience in personal trainer app development and are ready to create a high-quality app for you.

If you’re aiming to develop a workout plan app, you must focus on providing a variety of personalized training schedules and progress-tracking tools. Contact us and we'll help you bring your idea to life!

Fitness Trainer App

These apps connect users with personal trainers for customized workout plans and coaching. Trainerize is a leading example, offering personalized workout programs and client management tools for trainers.

Diet and Nutrition Apps

Every gym coach can tell you for sure that nutrition is an essential requirement when it comes to your overall well-being, health, and strength. That’s why some people prefer to download apps that allow tracking:

• their daily food eating habits;
• the calories burnt and taken in throughout the day;
• the water balance of the body;
• weight changes.

Additionally, such apps often have extra features besides tracking. For example, diet & fitness mobile application development may include creating grocery lists, barcode scanners food logging, etc.

Top fitness applications in this field include MyFitnessPal and Lose It! providing comprehensive diet tracking and meal planning features.

Apps for Meditation

With the use of guided meditations, concentrated deep breathing, and other methods, wellness app solutions developed through meditation app development services assist users in achieving mental calm. Through mood monitors, meditation clocks, and sleep tales, meditation or mindfulness apps may help users overcome anxiety and sleep difficulties and are a perfect complement to mindfulness activities.

Headspace and Calm are top examples, offering guided meditations and mindfulness exercises.

Yoga Applications

Catering to yoga enthusiasts, apps developed through specialized yoga app development services offer a range of yoga sessions and related content, enhancing the user experience. A basic yoga app will have planned training schedules, position reference manuals, and audio-guided yoga sessions.

Daily Yoga and Yoga Studio are popular choices, offering a variety of yoga routines for all levels.

📈 How Can Creating a Mobile App Gain Your Business in the Fitness Industry?

Client Engagement and Retention

Physical fitness software offers personalized experiences, including tailored workout plans and nutrition tracking, to keep users engaged and committed to their health goals. Essential features like progress tracking and goal setting help retain clients by motivating them to continue using the app to achieve their fitness goals.

Branding and Visibility

For enterprises, a mobile app enhances brand visibility, as it's a direct channel to consumers. The process of making a fitness app allows for customization to reflect your brand identity, thereby increasing brand recognition and loyalty.

Additional Revenue Streams

From an investor's perspective, fitness apps can generate revenue through various models like subscriptions, in-app purchases, and advertisements. Offering premium features or content can create additional income streams beyond the basic app functionality.

To build long-lasting relationships with your customers and incorporate effective workout app ideas, you’ll need Personal Profiles. In an application for online workout classes, they can be helpful in many ways:

• Allow users to become a part of the community, follow others, and engage in conversations.
• Link all purchases (subscriptions, bought courses) to specific user accounts.
• Store users' data, enabling them to resume their progress over time (e.g., when they reinstall the app or switch devices).
• Help users to keep track of their activity.
• Provide users with gamification elements like achievements, badges, etc.

Workout Plans & Exercise Library

This feature, crucial when you create your own fitness application, can be implemented in 4 important steps. Let's take a closer look!

#1 Categories

The categories screen is one of the easiest and most “organic” ways for your users to explore the content of workout plans. The main idea here is that Categories should be easily visible and reachable.

We’d also recommend complementing each category with an image to make it even more appealing to your users.

After opening the category, users will see the screen with relevant classes. And that’s when the next feature comes in handy.

#2 Filtering & Sorting

Users won’t spend much time trying to find what they need. They will just leave. And it’s something we don’t want them to do, right?

We have collected possible filter options for you 👇

Your on-demand cycling steaming classes app may have different filtering & sorting options but the list above seems reasonable enough to be considered.

#3 Class Details

When creating your own fitness app, it's essential to provide users with detailed information about each workout class. Thus, during custom wellness app development pay attention that each on-demand course can be opened for more information.

What should users see on that separate screen?

• Its name (e.g. 20 min Intervals Run).
• Difficulty.
• Instructor’s name (if you have more than 1).
• Short description.
• Needed equipment.
• Class plan with timing (warmup, list of exercises, cool down).
• Button to buy or play (if it’s free or has been already bought).
• The “Favourite” button to save course for later or add it to the list of the most liked ones.

Finally, the user will turn your workout on and enjoy 🙂

#4 Featured

Featured is a completely another screen that works as the feed in social media apps. What can you post here?

• New classes.
• The best (most popular) workouts from each category.
• Upcoming live in-app training.
• Workouts based on their previous history (for example, running for runners or distance tracking for cyclists).
• Everything that most of your users may find interesting and useful.

The main aim of this screen is to attract users’ attention and make them interested in discovering and using your app, showcasing its abilities, even if they haven’t thought about it at the moment.

To implement these engaging features, consider partnering with a professional development agency that specializes in fitness apps.

Progress Tracking

A key element in how to create your own workout app is ensuring that users can track their progress over time, especially through integration with IoT fitness devices (for example fitness tracker). Here are 3 main groups of parameters that you can track:

1. Daily activity: distance traveled, step tracking, and active minutes (core features of modern activity trackers).
2. Physiological parameters during workouts: heart rate monitoring during different workout stages, total training time, users' age to customize dietary recommendations, and personalized recommendations based on gender.
3. Sleep quality: duration, changes between sleep stages, the frequency of awakenings etc.

💡 Your app could also sync with sleep tracking apps to provide users with a complete picture of their wellbeing or you can incorporate speech recognition for hands-free workout navigation can improve user experience.

Nutrition and Meal Planning

Integrating a nutrition component in digital fitness software, often a key feature in healthcare app development services, where users can log meals and track calories, macros, and micronutrients, supports a holistic approach to fitness and receive personalized nutrition advice to align their diet with their fitness goals.

Weight tracker

If you want to make a fitness app with a nutrition block, a separate weight tracker screen is a necessary feature. Users should be able to manually log their numbers, monitor the weekly/monthly/overall progress via a dashboard, and see how close they are to achieving fitness goals.

💡 For a better UX, you can implement the dynamics of weight loss change as a nice-looking graphic.

Hydration measurement

Most people know that it’s not enough to just eat healthy - it’s also important to drink enough. Still, people forget to do it regularly, so that’s a problem that your app can solve.

Developing such a feature isn’t challenging in terms of technology so it won’t cost you that much. All you need is a screen where people can enter their water intakes, get reminders, and check if they’re properly hydrated.

💡 Fitness app design idea: an animated glass or a bottle that is filled with water as the user logs more intakes is a nice way to make a fitness app more interactive and catchy.

Barcode scanner

With so many different types of foods in our supermarkets, it's just impossible to always know what's healthy and what isn't. Moreover, it’s even more difficult to keep up the right balance of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and fiber in the diet.

So your users don’t have to read all the tags and calculate the “usefulness” of food on their own, you can implement a barcode scanner in your app.

For this purpose, it’s enough to allow the camera feature in your android app or iOS app and integrate a database of goods that will provide users with information about calories and nutrients. Finding a somewhat complete barcode database of products and the information about them is often the main difficulty, which we will give you a bit later.

💡 With interactive drag-and-drop features, meal planning becomes an engaging experience for users.

Food logging

Except for hydration measurement, a cool activity tracking app should also let its users monitor their daily food intake by maintaining detailed food diaries. Thus, they will be able to count how many calories they consume every day, monitor their dietary intake over time and how their nutrition can be improved overall.

Meal recipes, a quick calorie counter, and implementing a barcode scanner with a comprehensive database is one of the advanced features you can offer to ensure users easily track nutrients and calories.

Integration with Wearables and IoT Devices

In learning how to make a workout app, it's important to consider integration with wearable BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) devices like smartwatches (for example Apple Watch), sports bracelets, and clip-ons. Still, they’ve found their own audience.

Usually, wearable technologies just track physiological parameters (like the pulse or estimated calories burned) or other data (like distance walked or hours slept); some even don’t have screens to check it.

Learning how to make your workout app involves integrating with wearables and health IoT devices, enabling not only the retrieval of interactive information but also the making of data-driven decisions. For example, find out how much more you need to walk to lose the necessary amount of calories or how to improve the effectiveness of your training.

Social Features

In the process of how to make a fitness app, incorporating Social Features is essential, given the power of social media in the fitness trend. People are spending hours scrolling feeds, sharing photos, retweeting, and chatting with friends. So use it to your advantage!

First and foremost, implement the social login feature that we’ve already mentioned when we talked about user profiles. Additionally, consider social networks as a good marketing platform: allow users to share their achievements and workout plans, invite friends to join and train together, and so on. This will work as word-of-mouth marketing and bring you more customers.

People love to show off their achievements, and it can become a cool marketing channel for your app.

Push Notifications and Reminders

Push notifications are great for increasing retention and engagement rates. They are a simple and proven way to interact with customers even when they aren’t using your app.
Here are a few ideas on how you can use push notifications in your fitness app for gym:

• Promote new features, services, coaches, sales, etc.
• Remind users to workout if they haven’t done so in a while.
• Send encouraging messages to motivate the user to workout or use the app.
• Remind them about upcoming scheduled workouts online and offline.

In-app Purchases and Subscriptions

When you make your own fitness app, offering premium content or features through in-app purchases or subscriptions can become a significant revenue stream.

Community and Engagement

However, you’re not only interested in gaining new users. Keeping the old ones engaged with your app should be a priority for you, too. And that’s where the following tools can help you:

• Badges. These are rewards (icons) that users can get for accomplishing key achievements. They cost almost nothing for you but give your sports fans the feeling of certain milestones.
• Levels. You can also encourage users by giving them points for completing workout exercises like 10 kilometers of jogging or something like that. After collecting an amount of points, they are leveled up and face other challenges.
• Scoreboards. A simple but proven way to keep users engaged. Just make them compete with their friends and colleagues!

Creating a community features within the app, through forums, challenges, or a dedicated fitness blog, can foster a sense of belonging and support among users.

Appointment Booking

A crucial step in learning how to create a workout app, especially for sports club apps linked to trainers or fitness centers, is including an appointment booking feature. It enables your customers to easily book classes, group and personal training.

Online booking is much more convenient for your customers than phone calls or in-person booking at the front desk in your studio or gym:

• Talking is stressful. Mobile apps are not. Thus, your customers can take their time to carefully study all the open courses and their availability.
• Mobile apps are fast & simple. In a mobile app, users can book training with a few taps. It means they can do it while waiting in line in a supermarket or during breakfast — and the simpler the booking process is, the more people will use it!

Analytics and Reporting

This feature typically includes various tools and functionalities designed to analyze and present data, helping users track their progress, set goals, and make informed decisions about their fitness journey. Here are some key elements that may be part of the Analytics and Reporting feature in a fitness app:

• Workout History;
• Calorie Burn;
• Goal Progress;
• Nutritional Analysis;
• Sleep Tracking;
• Heart Rate Analysis.

Offline Mode

An offline mode ensures that users can access key features of the app without an internet connection. This could be the ability to download the workout you want in advance or download a map to track your run.

Live Streaming

If you want to create a workout app with live training, this piece of functionality is quite important.

From the user's perspective, they work almost the same way as the usual on-demand workouts. The main differences here are:

• It’s possible to join them only at a specific time.
• Obviously, users can’t fast-forward them.
• You can see the list of other people watching this session with you and give them a high five.

Privacy and Data Security

When you build your own mobile fitness app, protecting client data is essential. Encryption, which protects your data by transforming it into an unreadable format, is among the most crucial. Applications storing sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or login passwords, should prioritize encryption as it prevents hackers from obtaining such data in the event of a system breach.

A strong privacy policy will specify how your business intends to safeguard user data and what actions are taken if an individual's account is stolen by hackers or other bad actors. Two-factor authentication (2FA), which replaces the need for users to enter their passwords into websites or applications via text message sent to their phone number, is a useful security feature.

Geolocation

This enables users to design unique walking, jogging, and cycling plans. With the app's given map, it also makes it easier for them to see and keep track of the distance as they cycle or run. This data is helpful not just for tracking but also for motivating purposes.

Customer Support and Feedback

By using chatbots, you may automate answers to common inquiries, cutting down on response times and improving customer satisfaction all around. Also, you can add a FAQ section.

Chatbots and FAQs are made to answer standard and recurring questions, freeing up human support staff to concentrate on more complicated problems that call for individualized care.

Additionally, chatbots may be configured to collect pertinent data from users, which aids in the classification and prioritization of their inquiries. Through pre-screening, the system may direct questions to the right department or support agent, resulting in a quicker and more focused answer.

App Store and Google Play Integration

Optimizing the app for listing on the App Store and Google Play Store can enhance visibility and accessibility.

Scalability and Future-Proofing

The app should be designed with scalability in mind, allowing for future expansions and updates.

Defining the App Type and Target Audience

Determine the type of fitness app you need to develop, such as a diet and nutrition app, an activity tracking app, or a workout app. Research your target audience, it’s important to understand their needs and preferences. For insights on costs associated with building a fitness app for equipment’s console, check out this comprehensive Peloton app development cost guide.

Key Features Identification

Next comes the addition of core features including user profiles, registration/login, connecting third-party devices, activity tracking, geolocation, notifications, and reminders. Additional features may include goal setting, educational content, gamification, and social media integration.

Monetization Strategy

How will your application generate revenue? It’s important to determine the monetization model: paid applications, in-app purchases, advertising, or the freemium model.

Technical Aspects and Development

Plan the technical documentation, UI/UX design, and choose the right technology stack. When creating a fitness app, it’s important to focus on developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to validate your concept before scaling. Then you can develop the app for different platforms (iOS, Android) and ensure compatibility with various devices, especially wearables.

For example, you could develop a complete React Native fitness app that seamlessly integrates with wearable and BLE-based devices, transferring data from the equipment directly to the user's account.

Quality Assurance and Testing

To ensure your custom fitness application development project works as intended, you need to conduct thorough testing for bugs, usability, and performance on multiple devices. This is particularly important for fitness apps that interact with hardware like wearable devices, ensuring accurate data synchronization.

Before launching your fitness app, you should develop a prototype to make sure your app works as intended.

Launch and Marketing

Develop an advertising strategy for the effective launch of your application. Depending on the type of application, there may be different options. You can set up targeted advertising on social networks, and leverage external advertising opportunities. Your main goal is to reach the target audience.

Ongoing Support and Updates

Provide regular updates, fix bugs, and add new features based on user feedback. To ensure users can easily track progress, regularly evaluate your app's performance and optimize it for seamless user experience.

Feedback and Iteration

Continuously gather user feedback and iterate on the app to improve and meet evolving user needs.

🤝 How to Choose the Right Fitness App Development Partner

Choosing the right partner for the development of fitness applications involves a comprehensive assessment of various factors, including technical expertise. Let's delve into it further:

• In-Depth Understanding of the Fitness App Market: The ideal partner must have a profound understanding of the fitness app market. They should be well-versed in modern trends such as wearable technology integration, gamification, personalized user experiences, and the growing popularity of virtual fitness sessions. Additionally, they should have a good knowledge of competitors in this market.
• Experience in Fitness Mobile App Development: A partner with experience in developing fitness apps can tackle unique challenges and requirements, such as integrating with wearable devices and ensuring secure data processing. Their technical expertise should align with the needs of your project.
• Portfolio Evaluation and Thematic Research: Assessing their portfolio and thematic research provides insight into their capabilities and the quality of their work. Look at examples of fitness apps they have developed, paying attention to design, functionality, and user reviews.
• Preference for Intuitive and Visually Appealing User Interfaces: Choose a partner who prioritizes intuitively understandable and visually attractive fitness app interface. This ensures that the application will be appealing and easy to navigate.
• Priority on Data Security and Compliance: Given the confidential nature of health and fitness data, prioritizing security and compliance with relevant laws and regulations is crucial. The partner should demonstrate a strong commitment to data security and compliance with standards such as GDPR or HIPAA where applicable.
• Reliable Support and Regular Updates: Choose a partner who offers reliable support and regular updates.

Platoon Fit: This application elevates online workouts to a new level, focusing on health monitoring gadgets. We developed a React Native cross-platform app, with features like music streaming and health device data to enhance user engagement and personalize the experience.

FitTracks: This app, aimed at both beginners and seasoned athletes, offers voice-guided workouts and is recognized as a prevention course by the German government. We used React Native to ensure consistency across iOS and Android platforms, maintaining the design code of the existing website and integrating features for both online and offline course access.

SportPlus: The application that connects seamlessly with sports equipment for a personalized exercise fitness routine. Stormotion faced the challenge of integrating multiple BLE protocols for different devices, creating a generic protocol handler for effective communication. The app features clear and accessible workout management tools, even during intense exercise, and a CMS system for custom workout updates.

Force USA: Designed for a leading manufacturer of training gear, this app helps users maintain fitness progress with personalized training plans and goal tracking. Due to a tight development timeline, Stormotion adopted a unique approach, releasing basic functions first and adding others later marked as "Coming Soon." We also developed an importer for easy content management, enhancing the app's functionality and user engagement.