From Idea to Market: A Guide to Building a Successful Fitness App

Today’s global population is more than ever concerned with its health and well-being. Sports and physical activity are no longer considered something optional — now, people are increasingly aware of how their daily routines contribute to longevity. More than half of the healthy U.S. population reported concern for their well-being in 2022, and the numbers only grow. 

Since the coronavirus pandemic with its strict restrictions on gym access, fitness apps have become a game-changer for those isolated and bored. More affordable than personal trainers and available from literally anywhere, they have been kicking off quite rapidly. This drives an increasing demand for fitness applications due to health-conscious individuals: according to Google, users spend at least 50 minutes each day on their sports apps on average. 

The fitness app market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 9.3% between 2023 and 2030, from $3.8 billion to $7 billion by the end of this period, meaning it’s still a lush field for market penetration. 

If you want to enter the market and create a top-notch fitness app, it’s time to explore the steps it will take. This article will provide a step-by-step guide to building a fitness app from idea to launch and explain what features are a must in health and fitness app development.

Leading Types of Fitness Apps

You can probably find anything in this market if you look long enough, but some types of fitness apps are well-established — treat them as potential niches to tap into or understand the dominant trends.

Nutrition apps

Meal planning programs focus on calorie counting or suggesting recipes for users based on their dietary preferences. In 2023, the diet and nutrition apps market was valued at $308.7 million and is expected to progress at a CAGR of 17.1% from 2024 to 2032. 

Comprising one of the main niches in fitness in general, these apps for fitness are growing in number and demand alike due to diverse food preferences: to illustrate, more people are opting for plant-based diets while others, in contrast, are exploring carnivore nutrition. 

Many apps focus on keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, Atkins, and other diets. They usually feature specific calorie estimations based on users’ height, weight, age, and fitness goals. As a rule, they also regularly add reminders to log meal and weight data. YAZIO can serve as an illustration: it tracks calories based on meal category and includes intermittent fasting tracking and recipes.

Step counting/walking apps

Recent fitness mobile app development has become quite a rage with how creative they approach helping clients reach their step goals. Step-counting apps are connected to the device’s health data and automatically update users’ step numbers daily. 

Users can usually set daily step goals for themselves or join challenges with others online or offline. The complexity of such apps greatly varies as some have a simple and minimalist design while others have thematic approaches — take Fantasy Hike, for instance, that uses Lord of the Rings inspiration to compare users’ walking speed to certain characters.

Workout apps

The most popular category of all fitness apps, this one is all about offering large libraries with training and exercise suggestions. Usually catering to a person’s fitness level, these apps give diverse strength, stretching, or cardio exercises to help users achieve their health and body goals.

These apps can suggest at-home and no-equipment training programs or be gym-focused. Nike Training Club provides training options with and without equipment, and its sibling Nike Run Club assists with running goals; both create a training calendar with days of rest or specific exercises planned during the week. Others serve as workout logs (FitNotes) to help athletes identify their areas of growth.

Yoga & meditation apps

Yoga and meditation have become a separate part of the fitness market by combining mindfulness with static and breathing exercises. In 2023, the global meditation app market was valued at $1.39 billion; the yoga market in general (not just applications) reached $107.1 billion in the same year. 

However, both are often used interchangeably or are united under the name of “mindfulness apps,” indicating a cultural shift in their popularity worldwide. Usually, the programs don’t have such a specific focus on body goals and usually target mental wellness and health in general. Lotus Flow has hundreds of yoga classes, while apps like Calm have many meditation options.

Recovery apps

Many applications help individuals recover after operations and focus on their movement and strength rebuilding, while others provide help to cancer or stroke survivors. There’s a great need for such apps, too. 

According to WHO, up to 2.4 billion people have a condition that would benefit from rehabilitation efforts. And yet, many people affected by illnesses, surgeries, or traumas don’t have an option or willingness to recover. For example, up to 40% of stroke survivors admit to being inactive for a year after the incident, which negatively impacts them. 

The range in this area is diverse, and the market, while quite appealing, hasn’t been as crowded as the ones above. Such apps usually contain exercise plans, nutrition tips, and doctors’ contact information.

Step-by-Step Fitness App Development Process

So, how to create a fitness app? How many stages are there, and what should you do first? We’ve made a list of key stages in this process.

1. Research

Research, research, and research — that’s the key to your fitness startup success, so don’t take it lightly. Developing a fitness app starts with identifying your niche. Support your hypotheses with data: analyze how many people have the problem you want to solve and whether they are interested in your product. 

Identify your target audience, competitors, and entrance barrier. Collect information about fitness trends, your fitness app development cost, and the technology needed to make it real. 

Then, choose the platform(s) for your app, as this will significantly affect your finances and the length of the development process.

2. Prototyping and user testing

That’s where, if you don’t have a team to assist you, it’s time to get one for high-quality fitness app development services. Validate your design concepts by early-stage prototyping. 

Start by developing the wireframes, low-fidelity, and high-fidelity prototypes. Then, test them with users and gather their feedback. Your initial prototype will need to go through several rounds of testing before you’re satisfied. 

Important: during this stage, you already know what is your app’s point of contact with the user — do they need to connect the app to a TV set, will it require some additional features? Include these considerations in your testing.

3. Technology stack selection

When building a fitness application, your chosen technology will depend on the target platform, future integrations, budget, and agility goals.

If you plan to make your app for fitness mobile-only, you’ll go for native development (Swift for iOS, Kotlin/Java for Android). If you want cross-platform fitness solutions, you might want to choose something like React Native or Flutter. 

That’s why we mentioned evaluating your cost potential: cross-platform options are cheaper but often have more bugs and require additional tweaking before they work right. Native apps, however, are costly — especially if you plan to be present on several platforms and not just one — but typically have quality UX and better performance.

In addition to choosing the development framework, backend infrastructure is equally important. Cloud-based solutions like Firebase or AWS will give your app more flexibility for the future and ensure real-data synchronization. 

Enhance your program with third-party services to boost the app’s capabilities: many users today view this as a must because their apps are part of a larger personal system of health and fitness tracking.

4. Development and quality assurance

Now’s the time to move from concept and prototyping to creating a fitness app for real. This involves coding, integrating essential features, ensuring smooth user interactions, and optimizing performance for scalability. 

Choose your approach to developing a fitness application with your team, but keep development technologies in mind. Remember those third-party integrations mentioned above and add them during this stage.

Quality assurance consists of several types of testing to eliminate bugs and fix user experience issues before the launch. Typically, this would include functional, performance, cross-device (and cross-platform, if needed), and security testing. Don’t limit yourself to only automated testing since the manual will give you more information about your app’s usability and better validation.

5. Launch and post-launch

This stage is the final yet continuous step of the fitness application development process — it’s more than just uploading your app to the App Store or Google Play. It should begin prior to this: marketing is the heart of your app. 

Advertise your fitness application via social media, influencers, and official sports magazines. In case you have resources for additional promotions, offer discounts or limited-time premium access. 

However, you’ll need to monitor performance analytics and user feedback regularly. Even the best app will have to adapt and improve with time.

Fitness App Development Best Practices

Every app has its priorities, but there are some universal truths when it comes to creating a fitness application. Let’s cover them. 

Understand Your Target Audience

When developing fitness apps, keep the audience in mind. Understanding the demographics you intend to appeal to is the first step in your app’s success — not your design or pricing. 

If you plan to focus on beginners, exercises should be educational and simple, with plenty of no-equipment opportunities and a focus on improving strength and endurance. Athletes, on the other hand, want personalized plans that will push them to new limits. 

Consider the age of your audience as well: every audience has its limits. Children shouldn’t have heavy weight training, and seniors need exercises that will help them strengthen their bodies. 

If you want to create an app for people with specific health goals, you need a medical professional’s insight. Conduct market research, surveys, and user interviews to learn what your audience needs.

Prioritize User Experience

A fitness app shouldn’t distract users from the core value of the app — its content. Its interface must be intuitive and user-friendly. If you hesitate between more visuals or a clean design, go for the latter. 

Getting into fitness can already be an invisible barrier for many individuals, and they should start workouts, track progress, or explore new features without unnecessary complexity. Give your users a simple onboarding with a quick signup process, or they will lose interest fast. Training or nutrition plans should also be easy to understand and follow. 

Combine it with illustrative data for workout/meal history or progress tracking. Add different themes, a dark mode, and additional accessibility adjustments for people with vision issues (if you can, add audio descriptions for both training and navigation).

Focus on Engagement and Retention

Fitness is particularly vulnerable to user retention. As we’ve mentioned above, many people drop new habits, whether it’s sports or nutrition adjustment, in a few days or weeks. Encourage consistency by combining notifications with a fun experience. 

Gamify sports by initially making it a part of your app mechanics or giving badges and rewards for participation. Add notifications with positive suggestions and emphasize positive growth instead of aggressive progress that might scare users away. 

Allow socialization and community for the app, adding the option to share progress on social media and other platforms to encourage sharing one’s milestones.

Optimize Performance

Unlike some other kinds of apps that don’t require real-time data updates and progress monitoring, fitness apps should be in tune with users’ health, calorie intake/spending, and other factors that can overwhelm a poorly designed program. 

This can lead to slow loading time, bugs, or excessive battery consumption, all of which will drive your users away. When you develop a fitness app, try to use cloud-based storage, optimize video streaming, and add low-latency real-time tracking. This is often the decisive factor for people choosing whether to continue with your app.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Now you know how to make a fitness app, but some mistakes can still halt your success. Here are some widespread errors fitness startups make — check them off your list to save your time and resources.

• Overcomplicating features or interface. Lots of owners want to make their app so good they put everything in it. Many fitness app development solutions, when put to an extreme, can clutter navigation and overwhelm users. Start small, and then, as you expand and gather more information, you can move beyond core functionalities.
• Ignoring feedback or trends. We get it: sometimes, your vision is so focused you don’t really want to have it any other way. But trends change, and people can want something else. Failing to adapt to fitness industry shifts or dismissing user feedback can make an app feel outdated.
• Neglecting long-term engagement strategies. During the launch phase, it’s useful to provide short-term discounts and free trials, but keeping clients for longer will require a more comprehensive approach. Your program shouldn’t stop with that and instead go for regular community challenges and new content to retain the first users and focus on value.

Our Experience in Fitness App Development

Our SDA team had a unique opportunity to build a fitness app Nubod, a flexible user-centric diet and nutrition program that adapts to an individual’s goals and body changes. Our client looked for a fitness app development company to create a product that collaborates with diet coaches and provides biweekly updates based on users’ progress.

Our fitness app developers encountered the challenge of combining third-party APIs like Fitbit and Withings with rich functionality. We prioritized a user-friendly interface to make it easy for app users to create their meal plans depending on calorie numbers, duration, and personal features or needs. Since a significant part of the platform was about communication with the diet coaches, our task was further complicated by adding correspondence and video call options.

We developed Nubod in 2 months and integrated it with 6 APIs for enhanced performance. The pace of development and a strong shared view of the project saved our client approximately $20,000 in development costs. We also provided year-long technical support for an app to ensure its smooth launch and post-launch growth.

As of now, Nubod has diet programs and calorie calculations that allow the program to analyze the potential items on its shopping list. It integrates with other programs and tracks users’ progress. On top of that, it integrates round-the-clock support via email, chat, and private support groups.

Learn more about the case study.

Looking Into the Future of Fitness Solutions

Creating a top fitness app is a difficult task, one that takes more than just technical knowledge or vision alone. It’s rooted in collaboration and finding the right team to balance your far-reaching plans and the available resources. Don’t miss out on an opportunity, though: today, the fitness apps industry is the one where innovation thrives.

Need help to build your own fitness app that will be successful long after its emergence on the market? Feel free to reach out to us. Our team can help you with custom fitness app development and make your idea work. Whether you’ve got only a vision, a prototype, or an entire design — we’ll meet you there and move forward.