In recent years, the popularity of fitness apps has skyrocketed, being especially high during the times of the pandemic. Fortunately, the latter is over, and what’s even better, health and fitness apps are still popular, used, and demanded by users following a healthy lifestyle worldwide.
That’s why creating a fitness app can be a very promising idea in 2023. So, if you also want to capitalize on healthy lifestyle trends, discover how to create your own fitness application following the successful example of Nike Training Club. Without further undo, let’s get started.
Brief Overview of Nike Training Club
Before we proceed with the specifics of health and fitness app development, let’s take a brief look at Nike Training Club, one of the most popular fitness applications on the modern market. Nike Training Club or NTC was one of the first solutions of that kind. It was created back in 2009, and to date, confidently competes with MyFitnessPal, the most used exercise app globally.
So, Nike Training Club is a free fitness app that offers personalized workout plans, instructional videos, progress tracking, and analytics, as well as integration with wearable devices. The app provides a variety of workout types, including endurance, mobility, strength, and yoga, and offers guidance from professional trainers and athletes. Nike Training Club also features social elements such as sharing progress with friends, joining challenges, and connecting with other users. The app is available for download on iOS and Android devices.
As you can see, the number of features available is impressive. The users of NFC can also choose from several training programs, in addition to staying in close touch with a like-minded community and choosing professional fitness trainers around the globe. Let’s keep in mind this solution for ideas and inspiration, and proceed with fitness application development specifics.
Development Nuances to Consider While Creating a Fitness App
Despite developing a fitness app sounding like an exciting and promising business idea, there are also some nuances you have to keep in mind when deciding to launch a startup in the fitness app market.
- Your fitness app should provide deeply personalized experiences. Users expect an individualized approach when it comes to fitness apps. By integrating technology like AI and machine learning, you can provide users with personalized workout plans, nutrition advice, and progress tracking. For example, the app Freeletics uses AI to create personalized workout plans based on user goals, fitness levels, and feedback.
- Wearables integration is a must-have if you want to build a workout app. Wearable devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches have become increasingly popular among fitness enthusiasts. By integrating your app with wearables, you can offer users a seamless experience and access to more accurate data.
- Having gamification features would also be nice. Gamification features like rewards, challenges, and leaderboards can help motivate users to stay on track with their fitness goals. For example, the app “Zombies, Run!” gamifies running by turning it into a story-based game where users must outrun zombies and collect supplies.
- Users will appreciate social and community-building opportunities as well. Social features like sharing progress, joining challenges, and connecting with other users can help create a sense of community and support among users, which is especially important for those who are at the very beginning of their journey.
- When building a fitness app, user data security should be one of the top priorities. Fitness apps collect sensitive user data like health information and personal details. That’s why you have to prioritize data security, protect user privacy and prevent data breaches. For example, the app MyFitnessPal was hacked in 2018, compromising the data of millions of users.
How to Create a Fitness App
So, how to create a fitness app that will be able to compete with globally-recognized solutions? In fact, coming up with a promising idea for your future application and leveraging professional mobile app development services can be enough to make a fitness app that stands out. But let us guide you through the process of fitness mobile app development step-by-step.
Step 1 – Understanding the market
Before you build a fitness app your users will love, you have to investigate, research, and understand your target market first. Get started by analyzing the main competitors, like MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, Asana Rebel, and others. Highlight their strong features, discover the users’ opinions about each of them, and try finding some gaps to fill with your solution.
Next, depending on the gaps you found, discover more about the target audience with these precise pain points. For example, the most common complaints the users of fitness apps share include but aren’t limited to the lack of automation, for instance, synchronizing their workout schedule with an in-built mobile calendar, lack of social features, and inaccurate tracking of workouts or progress. Think of these gaps as winning opportunities for your new app.
Step 2 – Defining the features
Based on the existing gaps you have identified in the previous step, define the core features for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Just in case, let us briefly recap that an MVP is a kind of demo version of your future solution that comes with core features only. The goal of creating an MVP first is to test the users’ response and adjust the solution accordingly, keeping your fitness app development cost-effective.
So, let’s get back to the basic fitness app features your MVP should come with:
- Registration/sign-in
- User profile
- Wearable devices integration
- In-app purchases
- Payment system integration
- Push notifications
- Social features
Plus, you have to add one of several core features aimed at helping users meet their health and fitness goals. The set of these features largely depends on the type of fitness app you are about to build. For instance, you may add:
- Personalized workout plans
- Exercise library with instructional videos and images
- Gamification features
- Nutrition tracking and meal planning
- Water intake tracking
- Sleep tracking and analysis
- Meditation and mindfulness exercises
- GPS tracking for outdoor activities
Bonus! After you will be done with the basic features of your fitness app, you may consider adding some advanced ones. For example, you can provide your users with an opportunity to hire a personal online coach and add video guidance functionality. It would also be great to leverage artificial intelligence for better user data analysis and more personalized app content suggestions.
Step 3 – Designing the User Interface
After you have decided on the feature set you need to create your own fitness app, it’s time to proceed with designing the user interface. At this step, it would be wise to apply for mobile design and development services to leverage the best practices of a tech company and avoid costly pitfalls.
Also, keep in mind some rules for making a fitness app nicely designed:
- Keep it simple and user-friendly. Your fitness app should be easy to use and engage with. Pay attention to the ways competitors approach their application design and leverage their best practices. At this step, also pay attention to the possible inconveniences in their UI and try coming up with a better idea.
- Provide a seamless onboarding experience. According to a study by CleverTap, a mobile marketing and analytics platform, effective onboarding can increase user retention rates by up to 50%. So, make sure your app onboards the users in a seamless and engaging way. This is also where you should begin personalizing their experiences.
- Test your design ideas with a focus group. Last, but not least, make sure to test your UI and UX ideas with a focus group of target users. Analyze user feedback to identify areas for improvement, and then, proceed with the next step to create your workout app.
Step 4 – Developing the app
Now, it’s time to make your own workout app by coding its front and back-end parts. Overall, coding is a critical step in fitness app development that requires a skilled team of developers to bring the app to life. Here is where the development magic begins, so hiring a reliable tech vendor is essential for ensuring your app’s stability, scalability, and security.
To meet these goals, you have to choose the right mobile development technologies, depending on the operating system the major part of your target customers use. For example, if you want to build a fitness tracker app for Android, consider leveraging Java and Kotlin. Swift, in turn, can be a choice for iOS application development.
As an option, you can also ask your mobile development team about cross-platform tools. They allow for sharing codebase between Android and iOS, capturing the users of both platforms and delivering a close-to-native experience. Another benefit of this fitness tracker app development approach is cost saving, which makes it a smart option for creating and validating an MVP at an affordable cost.
Step 5 – Creating content
Preparing your app content is the next crucial step to developing a fitness app. So, if your application is aimed at helping users work out on their own and cook healthier meals, you have to provide them with visual and video guides on how to do this. You will also have to develop diverse workout plans and programs that should be automatically tailored to the goals users set, their physical parameters, workout experience, and expected outcomes. That’s why you should also consider collaborating with health and fitness professionals to deliver high-quality and expert content to your users.
Step 6 – Testing and launching the app
So, let’s move to the next step in your fitness app development. After the codebase and the app’s content are ready, you have to test your application, ensuring that it’s about entering the market without bugs and glitches. For this goal, testers and Quality Assurance (QA) specialists run functional testing to ensure that all the parts and features operate as intended.
Next, your QA team has to conduct usability testing, using various devices and user scenarios. Once the functional and usability testing is complete, the specialists move on to performance testing. This involves measuring the app’s performance under different conditions, such as low network connectivity or high user traffic. The testers also perform security testing to ensure that the user data is protected.
Then, it’s time for beta testing, which gives real users the opportunity to try the app in a production environment, and if everything is fine with it, you can launch your solution to the App Store and/or Google Play.
Step 7 – Growing the user base
Now, you know how to create your own workout app. But how can you grow the user base and promote your solution to a wider target audience? Obviously, you need a marketing strategy, which can include blog content development and social media promotion.
As for the latter, pay special attention to influencer marketing. Partnering with influencers who have a strong following in the fitness niche can be an effective way to promote a fitness app. The matter is that modern users are highly loyal to influencers, especially to non-celebrities. Partnering with them is cost-effective, plus it helps you gain credibility and trust among potential users.
Step 8 – Updating and improving
After your fitness app is launched to the market, it’s time to work on its continuous updating and improvement. This process involves analysis, testing, and iteration to ensure that the app remains effective and engaging for users.
At this step, analyzing users’ feedback and adjusting the app accordingly is essential for keeping their engagement and retention high. Meeting users’ demands, listening to their opinion, and matching their expectations is also a proven way to keep your fitness app competitive.
In addition to addressing user feedback, the development team should also stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the fitness app market. This can include integrating with new wearables or fitness tracking devices and incorporating new workout types or social features.
How Much Does It Cost to Create a Fitness App?
So, after we have discovered how to develop a fitness app step by step, let’s discover an approximate fitness app development cost. The most important thing about it is that estimating the final price with 100% accuracy is rarely possible, since it depends on several essential factors.
The complexity and the number of its features, the number of integrations, and the complexity of the technologies you will use (for example, artificial intelligence or augmented reality) are influencing the cost to develop a fitness app. Also, such things as the seniority level of your software developers, their hourly rate, and location matter from the final price tag.
That’s why, if any software development company provides you with an approximate cost breakdown, keep in mind that this sum may vary after a more detailed consultation. Usually, it is adjusted based on technology and the seniority level of your future software developers. But, even an approximate budget can be used for getting a rough idea of the possible cost to develop a fitness application. However, you are always welcome to use our online calculator, or share your project idea with our managers to get a more accurate estimate!
Developing a Fitness App – Litslink Case Study
If you still wonder how to create your own fitness app, you are at the right place to get all the answers, plus access top-notch fitness app development expertise. At Litslink, we have recently developed a Nutralet—a cross-platform mobile app that helps fitness coaches develop personalized nutrition plans custom-matched to their clients’ goals.
We have created Nutralet with React Native, plus supported the application with a nicely designed website. In addition to connecting fitness coaches to their customers, the application also uses data analysis technology and machine learning to provide users with hyper-personalized and coach-approved nutrition plans.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, Nike Training Club is a great fitness app that comes with all the essential features to help users leverage technology for leading a healthier lifestyle. However, your fitness app also has a high chance of standing out and disrupting the fitness app market. The only thing you have to do is to develop it right, providing the users with such key elements as personalization, gamification, social sharing, and wearables integration.
We, at LITSLINK, would be happy to support you along the way and share our best practices in fitness application development. With our expertise and experience in building outstanding solutions for healthcare, fitness, nutrition planning, and healthy lifestyle, you will be able to create an app that stands out in a crowded market and provides a personalized, engaging, and effective experience for users.
Send us a quick message now to get an accurate cost estimate!
