How to Build a Gym Scheduling or Fitness app Like Fitbit?

The year 2020 was the perfect example behind the saying “Health is Wealth.” It was the time when a microscopic entity was the most feared thing on the planet. It led nations into lockdown, businesses to halt, and restricted people into their homes. While most of the industries were facing massive losses, the market for health apps was on the rise.

As per stats, there was a surge of 46% in the download of health and fitness apps around the world. Moreover, this rise was around 156% in India.

The growth in the app market was massive, and it still is. Global newswire suggests that the revenue of the fitness app market will reach up to $298.30 Billion by 2026.

So, if you have an established gym business or you are planning to start one, you need to have a gym scheduling app or a fitness tracking app.

The big question that might be whirling in your mind is how to make such an app? The app-building process is a simple one if all steps are properly undertaken.

Pre-requisites for making a Fitness Tracking App or a Gym Scheduling App?

Before you get into the app-building process, you need to make sure if it has viability. Yes, the market demand for these apps is high, but these apps are of various types, and you need to find out which one will have a good market and early adopters.

You need to include the discovery phase in the fitness app development process. You may ask what the discovery phase is?

The Discovery phase is the most critical aspect of the app development process. It helps you know the viability of your product. As 42% of the businesses fail due to the fact that their product does not has a market, the discovery phase becomes necessary.

The components of the discovery phase are:

• Market research
• Competitor research
• Cost analysis
• Identification of target audience
• Identification of business goal

The discovery phase offers you various benefits like:

• Streamlines your workflow
• Assemble the best team for the job
• Generate effective prototypes
• Assists in risk management
• Reduction of overall project cost
• Validates your fitness app idea

Features of a Fitness App

Now, when you are clear about everything, you have to proceed with the features that you need to keep in your fitness tracking app like Fitbit.

Fitbit is kind of an all-round app that has features like exercise tracking, sleep tracking, heart rate tracking, nutrition, weight, and many more!

If you are building a master fitness app, you need to add all of these features with some add-on features. Fitness apps can be classified as:

• Activity tracking apps
• Workout apps
• Nutrition apps

Let’s look at the features that come under the above-mentioned fitness apps:

• Activity tracker: This feature of your app will help the users in analyzing factors as distance traveled, time taken, and the number of steps. Other than this, you can also add tracking for physiological aspects like heart rate.
• Sleep tracking: To help users know if they have slept well or not, you need to add the feature of sleep tracking too. It should include duration, frequency of awakening, and sleep changes.
• User profile: As your app will be monitoring so many aspects for the user, you need to have the personalized profile feature in the app. A personalized profile can help the user know how much they have progressed so far. Moreover, once they have logged into their profile, it would become easy for them to add information like age, weight, gender, location, social profiles, etc.
• Target setting and push notifications: If you want your users to keep using your app for long, it is necessary to keep them updated about their goals. For this, you need to implement push notifications in the app regarding upcoming training, water intake, etc. moreover, provide them with some daily targets to achieve. You can also allow users to set targets by themselves.
• Nutrition features: A fitness app is not just about tracking and exercising. You also need to add nutritional features like:
• Food logging: For logging is food that the user consumes for making diet plans. You can add a bar code scanner to make the food logging process easy for the users.
• Water intake tracker: Allow the users to add their water intake on a daily basis. Based on this, provide reminders.
• Workout features: To help users is doing their workout effectively, you can add features like:
• • Live streaming: This feature will help users in getting video consultations from their fitness coaches.

• Exercise menu: Add this menu in your app based on the type of goal the user wants to achieve, like reducing belly fat, building abs, etc.
• Workout videos: As some users might be new to the workout regime, they may not know about the proper techniques of workout. To help them, you can add workout videos in the app.
• Smart device integration: To add extra functionality to your fitness app, you can make it compatible with smartwatches and smart bands. You can use APIs provided by manufacturers of Garmin, Apple, Withings, and more!

Do add these features to get the best Fitness or Gym scheduling app!

Tech Stack required for Fitness App Development

There is nothing more powerful than state-of-the-art tools when it comes to providing fitness app development services. As a software development firm, you need to have a powerful tech stack for developing an app. For fitness app development, you need to have the following:

• Frontend development: HTML 5, Javascript, Angular, CSS, Swift, Kotlin.
• Backend development: Ruby, Python, PHP
• Geolocation: Google location API, Core location
• Notifications: Google Cloud Messaging, Apple Push

Monetization Models

Whether you provide fitness app development services or making one for yourself, you can look into the following monetization models for your fitness app!

• In-app purchases

• Paid app

• eCommerce

• Advertisements
• Freemium

Fitness App Development Cost

The development cost of a fitness app varies on the features that you want to include in the app. For example, if you want to include just the basic features along with activity tracking, it will cost you less (around $17,000) at $50 an hour. Therefore, the approximate number of hours will be 340-350.

On the other hand, if you want to develop a comprehensive app with all of it, it will cost you around 35k – 40k USD. The number of hours, in this case, will be about 800.

Final Words

As you have all the crucial information about fitness app development, you can provide brilliant fitness App Development services to your clients. Moreover, if you have a unique fitness app idea of your own, you can implement that too.