Fitness, yoga, sleep, personal improvement, and management. Telemedicine, self-care, sleep management, and healthy nutrition. Biohacking and making your body work as a well-tuned clock. There are challenges that are solved by diverse types of wellness applications. Check the wellness application development company to see how they are developed and how much you should pay for them.

If you want to enter this industry, let’s first explore how it works and which app types can be relevant today.

Who uses them?

Wellness applications aim at the whole population, as health and life satisfaction are universal for all sentient living creatures. However, the target audience includes engaged, well-motivated people who are interested in making their lives better and achieving success and have clear life goals. Such personalities will be happy to tinker with wellness apps of various types to monitor their condition and constantly improve them.

See the download statistics of fitness apps, the most popular category among such services. Notice the significant Covid-related decrease in 2020 and an overall sharply increasing trend.

Who benefits from them?

You can easily develop your own wellness application, but make sure that you have competency in the topic, at least on the upper-intermediate level. If you want a yoga app, be sure to know about asanas, their anatomical and physiological influence, and a short history of yoga. If you want to enhance people’s sleep, learn the latest studies regarding sleep processes and phases and, maybe, lucid dreaming.

• Fitness centers will benefit from fitness apps, as they greatly improve their customer experience and empower them with new options to train them.
• Yoga studios, similarly, can use yoga apps to greatly enhance their performance.
• Coaches will be grateful for fitness and yoga apps, too. Good contact with their customers via robust communication services and the ability to track their progress will help them retain customers and train them successfully.
• Clinics can use the whole range of healthcare apps to contact clients remotely, analyse their conditions, and make smarter and more efficient medical decisions.
• Medical specialists, especially in fields such as psychotherapy, sleep, and nutrition, will admire such applications. Similar to coaches, they can facilitate their contact with customers, help them find new ones, and provide essential information related to their fields.
• Businesses can use various types to ensure decent and healthy working conditions in their workplaces, as it is proven that meditation, yoga, and smart time management reduce stress and improve productivity greatly.

Types and examples

All aspects of human life can potentially be improved. With this idea, let’s explore possible types of wellness applications.

1. Fitness apps provide a lot of training courses, track users’ activity, show insights and tips, and set fitness goals, such as achieving muscular mass and losing weight. Examples are MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, and Nike Training Club.
2. Nutrition apps are focused on internal, not external: they track calorie intake, monitor diet, and provide meal suggestions. Examples include MyPlate and Fooducate, while MyFitnessPal also has such features.
3. Mental health apps help to reach mental wellness and cope with stress, depression, anxiety, and bad moods. They provide psychological tips, calm music and diary options, and consultations. Examples include Headspace and Calm, which are also close to the two app types mentioned below.
4. Yoga and meditation apps are closely connected with mental health, fitness, and stress reduction, but such spiritual practices are clearly distinct from anything else. They provide a wide range of materials, courses, music, and motivation for these practices. Examples include Down Dog and Asana Rebel.
5. Sleep apps track sleep patterns and phases, monitor sleep quality, and set smart alarms which wake customers up at the time right for their bodies. Examples include Sleep Cycle, Sleep Better, and Pillow.
6. Medical apps consist of a diverse category for managing medical conditions, prescribed medications, track patients’ symptoms, and find healthcare providers. Examples include WebMD and Medisafe.
7. Self-organization apps help users develop healthy habits and organize their daily routine according to schedules and notifications. They often use gamification, ratings, and levels to motivate customers, rather than simple to-do lists. Examples include Habitica, Fabulous, and Streaks.
8. Women’s health apps include menstrual cycle tracking and pregnancy support, often including valuable tips. Examples include Flo and Ovia Pregnancy.
9. Activity trackers record and show the daily activity levels, such as steps taken, distance traveled, and calories burned. Examples include well-known Google Fit, Samsung Health, and Apple Health.
10. Self-care apps form out a funny composite type, including some features of self-organization, meditation, and nutrition apps. They use various tips and data analysis to show the customer the best activities for them to feel happy. Happify and Youper are good examples.

Wellness applications aim to improve people’s physical, emotional, and mental health, each in their own specific way. Also, they help various wellness industries to develop. 

By comprehending that, you can combine various aspects for your app, making it unique and useful.

Benefits and advantages

Their benefits are much more straightforward than in most other apps’ cases. They just make customers stronger, happier, and more successful in life. The app’s success depends on the success of its user. See one of the examples of the well-being scheme below, and read more about it here. And think about how your product can help improve some of these categories.

Essential features

Fitness, yoga, sleep, or productivity: all of them have something similar when talking about the basic functionality of a wellness application. 

• Personal account is the base of your app, as a user will show it when they will sign up. If it will reject them, they will go, and you’ll lose them. Your user should know where they are and where to go to reach a necessary feature.
• Synchronization, as health-related data are crucial for customers. You must ensure they will access them when necessary and where necessary.
• Knowledge library with information relevant to your app type: yoga asanas, sleep phases, mental issues, fitness exercises, food descriptions, and so on.
• Social integration is a good thing here, as people love boasting about their achievements in self-development!
• Communication options may include message and file exchange and live streaming, which is especially useful for telehealthcare apps, but can be used for achievement sharing, too.
• Wearable integration, such as with fitness trackers, will certainly be a large benefit.
• Data analysis software is a must-have tool to provide information about user activity.
• Tracking includes recording the calories eaten, steps paced, exercises completed, and all other relevant actions.
• Notifications are crucial to remind your customer that they must be active and happy – in the context of your app!

You can think about combining these features and find other examples for inspiration and new ideas. Remember to make your app unique while remaining specific: it should improve some part of human life without any scattering. 

With these thoughts, let’s evaluate their development.

Development evaluation and process

A wellness application is typically an average-complexity one, as it does not require any serious features, albeit thorough user data analysis could be beneficial. Still, its features are quite complex and diverse, as it must improve the whole sector of life. See an example of a mental health app below.

As always with app development, the process is similar. Starting from goal-setting to release, you must keep in mind your wellness application’s overall idea and mission. You write code and create a vivid interactive UI not to play, but to facilitate people’s sleep, increase their endorphin production, or motivate them to do sport.

1. Planning and mission/vision creation are where we should start. Which life segment your app will improve and why do people want it to be improved? How you will deliver this change to the world? Evaluate your competency and what you should know to realize this idea.
2. Then, research the market and create an approximate image of your customer. Who they are, why would they use such an app, and who are your competitors? Your features and promotion strategy will be based on these insights.
3. A concept should be used to develop a minimum product version, which will demonstrate and test the app’s core features. You can easily analyze its functionality without larger expenses.
4. Design and development include turning all concepts into a ready-to-use product, so it is a time- and money-consuming stage. Start it when you’re sure that. Don’t forget to integrate interactivity such as social networking or game-like ratings and levels.
5. Testing includes QA to indicate and fix any flaws and feedback analysis to make your product more suitable for people. The approximate customer image from the second point now turns to the real KPIs, which should be adjusted and counted.
6. Release and maintenance include issuing your app for download, marketing it, and scheduling updates to keep it fit for the world.

Takeaway

Thus, wellness applications can be very different, but all of them strive to improve humanity’s physical and mental well-being. You can select some of them to combine in your own type. The most crucial aspect is to decide which life sphere your app should improve and reach at least upper-intermediate proficiency in it. Then, you can create an outline for the application, and it will be a strong base for its successful development.

Tim Williamson, a psychology graduate from the University of Hertfordshire, has a keen interest in the fields of mental health, wellness, and lifestyle.