Nowadays, yoga has turned from an exotic Brain-Mind-Body practice into one of the most popular well-being routines. When combined with mobile technologies, which is another trend that started in the last decade, it usually results in tremendous success.

Moreover, it looks like the popularity of yoga apps will only grow and get more stable.

During the COVID lockdowns, billions (and we’re not exaggerating) of people all over the world had to stay home for months. For most of them, mobile applications turned out to be universal helpers in everything from food delivery and entertainment, to online education and home yoga classes.

That’s why mobile-centric companies experienced worldwide lockdowns as an opportunity to grow and scale, while for traditional online businesses, the lockdowns have become one of the biggest challenges of the XXI century so far.

How do you know it’s not idle talk? Check Google Trends! You can see huge leaps in Google searches for yoga apps worldwide at times when the most strict measures were taken regarding coronavirus.

The same idea is evident if we take a look at these statistics):

• The global yoga market size is estimated to be $80 billion.
• There are over 300 million yoga practitioners worldwide.

It shows us that yoga app development has a great potential that isn’t going to decrease soon. What happened over the past several years boosted the popularity of yoga apps. In fact, it’s going to be and already is more stable.

If you are thinking about building your own yoga application, you can probably find yourself in one of these 2 categories:

1. You’re either a yoga studio owner or teacher (in other words, you have a running business in this industry, either offline or without a user-friendly application) who wants to have more tools to retarget and retain your audience, as well as do it more efficiently. Moreover, you can not only cover your existing customers but reach a much wider audience.
2. You’re a Startup Company in this field that doesn’t have any offline yoga-related business but has a unique idea and vision on how to help yoga practitioners with their challenges.

Before we dive into the details of developing a yoga application, let’s imagine the portrait of typical yoga practitioners, their pain points and ways you can help them.
/
/

🧘‍♀️ Yoga App Users: Their Pain Points and Your Solutions

If you want to successfully target those yoga students who have high chances of becoming your paying customers, it’s important to outline their key characteristics. Here they are:

What pain points do they have and what solution can you offer them?

So what are the reasons to develop an app for yoga? Take a look at the reasons below and the answer will appear on its own!
/
/

🏬 Why Build an App for a Yoga Studio?

A mobile application can be a powerful enhancement to your business. The best thing about yoga app development for your existing business is that it can be used for both acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones.

Thus, your target might be:

Customers (or potential customers who are considering this opportunity right now) that are looking for a deeper and more personal interaction with your teachers/studio, and people that match your buyer portrait but are located in other cities and regions.

Developing a yoga application opens a new window of opportunities for you: it can make it possible to provide your services to people who can’t visit your studio physically (for example, because they live in another city) but who are willing to watch your online classes, have an ability to chat with your teachers, etc.

Therefore, the main reasons to create a yoga app for your studio are:

1. You will be able to support a more personalized relationship with your customers.
2. It is also possible to reach a new audience with your sessions and sell yoga exercise packs not only to people in your region, but all over the globe.
3. You will have more tools to retain clients.
4. Customers will be able to pay for the membership plans online on a recurring basis in just several clicks from their smartphones.
   /
   /

👨‍💻 Why Develop an App for a Yoga Startup?

Just like for classical businesses, it’s quite reasonable for Startups to create an App. The stats from the Yoga Alliance’s Report prove this idea:

• 98% of yoga practitioners consider their level as beginner-intermediate. Therefore, they need some guidance and assistance — a pain-point that you can target.
• 59% of people who do yoga, practice it at least once a week. It means they’ll have a repeated need in your application.
• Yoga practitioners are usually good-earners, so the audience you are targeting is also a ready-to-pay one. .
• As an online and mobile-centric business you'll be able to interact with any of your users, any time, from anywhere — something that traditional offline businesses can only be jealous of.

As a Startup, you could target, for example, the following audience:

Individual yoga practitioners of a beginner/intermediate level who do yoga on their own 2 times per week and seek professional guidance and tips.

The key challenge here is your USP (Unique Selling Point). In other words, what you’re going to offer your audience, so that you stand out from what your competitors already provide, and why your audience is going to pay for your product.
/
/

📱 Top Yoga App Features to Consider

No matter what audience you want to target, it’s still important to build a good (from the technical perspective) product. What features should be on your list? Let’s find out!

# 1: Registration 🔐

Whoever your users are, they most likely expect to get personalized content. Also, registration is especially important if you plan to implement some in-app purchases (for example, online yoga courses/videos). It will help to link a specific user to their purchases, so they don’t get lost if they uninstall the app or switch to another device.

However, don’t forget that users are usually annoyed by a long and complicated registration process. A Social Login Feature, also known as a Passwordless Email/SMS Sign Up is something that can help: it allows reusing data from social media networks (like Facebook or Twitter) to create the in-app profile or just receive a “magic” link to your email, which redirects you back as a registered user once clicked.

Apart from that, it’s reasonable to integrate Google Account and Apple ID sign-ins using the APIs we linked. As for the Social Media Logins, you can enable such using APIs like authO.

Additionally, don’t make the registration mandatory. We recommend leaving an option to skip the registration and come back to this process later, once you really need some data from the user (e.g., for payment).

# 2: Yoga Sessions 🧘‍♂️

This is one of the key yoga app features that your audience expects to see. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to provide such content:

1. It may be videos recorded by your teachers or you (if you’re running your separate studio).
2. You can use images to demonstrate exercises (like in the Pocket Yoga app).
3. As a kind of an intermediate option, it’s also possible to create animations that will show the right technique (like in the 5 Minute Yoga Workouts app).
4. You may even run live yoga sessions!

Based on our experience, we recommend you to make own yoga app with the first option. Why? Because it looks more natural, provides more value than a simple animation or a static image and promotes you or your teachers to the audience. Moreover, it initiates a deep connection between you and your audience, as they see a real person speaking on their screens.

What is also great about the Yoga Sessions feature is that you can organize it in any convenient way. Here are a few ideas for you:

• Create curated collections to satisfy users with different needs.
• Offer guided classes that take place in real-time to support and help users during the whole session.
• Develop long-term workout plans (from several weeks and up to a month) in which different exercises are combined to reach a specific result.
  /
  /

# 3: Push Notifications 🔔

Finally, don’t forget about Push Notifications. There are plenty of ways to use them as you develop an app for yoga. For example:

• Encourage your clients to participate in your sessions regularly.
• Remind users about upcoming events.
• Inform the audience when new yoga exercise collections are available.

Push Notifications are a powerful retargeting tool, so we strongly recommend you to add it to your yoga app features MVP list.

You can also use push notifications to send users reminders and take some moments to breathe deeply during the day and take a couple of mindfulness breaks to support their mental well-being. In case you’d like to learn more about building an application for mental health, feel free to follow the link:

# 4: eStore 🛍

The yoga industry is much wider than just exercises and meditation courses. For example, people also need comfortable outfits, yoga mats, bags, towels, blocks and straps, meditation seatings, and so on.

So, although it’s not really an MVP-feature, if you’re selling some of these goods, it’s possible to create a yoga app that will also work as an online marketplace. According to some studies{target=_blank rel="nofollow noopener"}}, mobile apps are even a better solution for retail purposes than a website since:

• Apps have a 120% higher conversion rate.
• People browse 286% more products using their mobile devices.
• The add-to-basket rate is also higher (up to 90%).

Therefore, you can greatly increase your key sales metrics.

/
/

# 5: Blog 📰

Usually, this feature doesn’t fit into the usual MVP list, so we’d recommend keeping it for the coming updates after your app gets a Proof of Concept. The good news is that it can be useful for both types of projects. Why?

Because people enjoy interesting and useful content. No matter if you plan to build an app for a yoga studio or a Startup with online yoga courses, your audience is likely to get more info on different techniques and methods, news, etc., through a blog.

What is also great about the Blog Feature is that nowadays, people are open to share things they like. It means that they can repost your blog posts on their social media pages and become your brand promoters among friends and relatives.

This is also where the Social Media Login can come in handy. To make sure that users also benefit from connecting their media accounts to your app, you can offer them bonuses like discounts for paid content or unique avatars for their accounts.

/
/

# 6: Coach Q&A 💬

We see this feature as a part of your possible monetization strategy since it provides your audience with some advanced possibilities (this is especially true for Startups). Yet, if you’re developing a yoga application to complement your offline business, it may be reasonable to consider it free-of-charge and use it as a powerful tool to build a strong relationship between your studio and customers.

This feature can be a chat with a yoga coach that can help with exercise technique or answer some organizational questions related to your studio.

You can also do it via the video sessions and surely would need a special features for that. It should be:

• Camera & audio functions.
• Turn on/off buttons.
• Chat within the call.
• Live reactions (like smiling or clapping emojis).
• Screen sharing (option) & others.
  /
  /

# 7: Gamification 🏅

People love challenges. For you, this means that you can use challenges to keep users interested in frequent interactions with your brand. Providing the audience with a feeling of accomplishment is one of the best ways to keep your retention and engagement rates high.

A great way to implement this feature is to reward users with badges as they get certain achievements (complete a course, workout a few days in a row, etc.).
/
/

# 8: Events 🏃‍♀️

If you regularly hold yoga training, chances are high you also organize some offline events like outdoor sessions, practices with invited yoga gurus, etc.

Therefore, you can make own yoga app that will keep users informed about such activities. As a result, more people will know about your initiatives and join which means that your customer base will remain active and enthusiastic.

However, this feature may be also useful for Startups that want to build a strong community around their apps. Just like the Nike+ training — they have nothing to do with the official Nike representatives and are completely based on the enthusiasm of local users.

⚙️ Tech Stack For Yoga App Development

Here are some technical tools that your Tech Partner can use to keep the good price-quality ratio and deliver your application on time:

• Facebook Mobile SDKs can be helpful in many different ways: a fast sign up process, analytics, monetization, providing customer support through Messenger etc.
• If you want to create a yoga app with in-app payments, Stripe or Braintree SDKs are definitely some of the best options.
• Firebase SDK can be used in many ways. For example, you can implement a Push Notifications feature. Also, you can use the Firebase Console at your first stages to avoid building a separate Dashboard.

📚 Case Study: Pocket Yoga, Find What Feels Good

Before we finish, let’s review a few yoga app examples to see how the mentioned above theory meets practice.

Pocket Yoga & Pocket Yoga Teacher

This Startup is a perfect example of how you can connect instructors and learners by developing a yoga application.

The Pocket Yoga application application is designed for those who want to practice yoga. The most remarkable features are:

• The exercise database includes over 200 illustrated poses (moreover, each goes with the voice instructions, description, and benefits).
• Users can choose practice sets created by professional teachers.
• Another idea you can reuse when developing a yoga application is letting users play music from their device’s library or other apps in place of the default music.

However, there is even more than this! They’ve also delivered the Pocket Yoga Teacher app. As you can guess from its name, the application is designed for yoga instructors. What are they able to do within the app?

1. Create, edit and share yoga practice sets.
2. The editing possibilities are quite broad: teachers are allowed to change the order and duration of poses, adjust the voiceover, add music, etc.

Their monetization model is paid downloads. They have two versions of the app - for practitioners and teachers that also differ in price.

Find What Feels Good (FWFG) Yoga with Adriene

The FWFG application is a great example of how you can build an app for a yoga studio or your own brand. Adriene is a yoga instructor, actress and co-founder of this online yoga library. Her whole app is built around the idea of creating a strong and successful community that connects health experience to real faces.

The monetization strategy is based on the subscription model: from $9.99 a month to $99.99 a year with a 7-30 days free trial period. For this money, people can access the following functionality:

• 100+ hours of HD videos.
• Possibility to download content for offline use.
• The comment section for community members to share their ideas and opinions.
• Social sharing.

As you can see, the set of features is quite basic. Yet, the app has an average rating of 5 stars (the best possible) based on 2200+ ratings.
/
/

💰 Cost to Make a Yoga App

Here is the estimate of costs to build a yoga app from the Stormotion Team:

So, the yoga app development costs are between $20-25,000 including the extra features and about $13-18,000 without them.

We used an average rate $45/hour that is quite standard for Eastern Europe. If you want to get a more accurate estimate of costs to develop a yoga app, provide us with the details of your project by hitting the button at the end of the article.
/
/

💡 Takeaways

Yoga app development is a good idea for both Businesses and Startups operating in this industry:

• If you have your own studio, you can make own yoga app to build a stronger relationship with your customers and encourage them to interact more often with your brand.
• However, there are many yoga app examples that initially started as small startups and managed to grow into big products.

Looking for the perfect Tech Partner that will help you to deliver your Yoga App? Contact Stormotion by hitting the button below and we’ll shake the yoga industry together!