How to Develop a Wellness App: Case Study-Based Guide

According to Statista, revenue in the health and wellness training market is expected to reach $17.37 billion in 2024. User penetration is 13.69% (as of 2024) and is expected to reach 15.79% by 2029. Globally, the highest revenue will be generated in the United States ($3,829.00 million in 2024).

Real-World Examples

There are already many successful health apps on the market; let's review the most popular ones in different categories:

Similarly, for yoga enthusiasts, partnering with a yoga app development company can help create an app that meets specific user needs.

Wellness Apps Future

As 2024 approaches, the environment for these applications is expected to change dramatically, ushering in a new era of wellness that goes beyond simple step monitoring and calorie counting.

Future trends include:

- AI-Based Personalization.

In some apps, we already see attempts to integrate artificial intelligence, so in the future, we expect further development of intelligent algorithms that will analyze user data, considering factors such as sleep patterns, stress levels, and dietary preferences.

This will be particularly beneficial for those interested in how to make an app for women's health.

- Fitness in Virtual Reality (VR)

Using VR technology to make workouts more interactive. Instead of static videos explaining exercises, the market will shift to more engaging solutions with workouts featuring AI trainers in virtual reality, simulating the experience of having a personal trainer.

- Focus on Mental Health

In the future, we expect even more attention to this topic, with the creation of large libraries of different types of meditations, stress/sleep tracking and analysis.

Engaging a healthcare app development company can provide the expertise {target=_blank} needed to integrate advanced mental health features.

Types of Wellness Apps

Mental health app developers have embraced a diverse range of approaches to meet the diverse needs of their users. Understanding the distinct types of wellness apps can help guide your development process and ensure that your app meets the specific needs of your target audience.

Workout and Training Apps

With these apps, users track how many steps they take, how many calories they burn, and how far they walk each day. Also include workout plans, goal-setting tools, and up-to-date progress information.

*Check out our customer's review – Force USA is an workout app for functional training equipment *

Meditation and Mental Health Apps

Meditation apps offer users guided meditations, stress relief programs, and mindfulness techniques. These help alleviate anxiety, improve sleep, and minimize severe mood swings.

Nutrition and Diet Apps

These apps are designed for meal planning, calorie monitoring, and logging your food intake. The apps also offer personalized meal plans and complete information about foods.

Sleep Tracking Apps

Sleep apps check your habits and provide tips on how to achieve restful sleep. These may include setting a smart alarm clock, going to bed regularly, and monitoring your environment.

Hydration Reminder Apps

Apps remind users to drink water regularly by sending notifications. They usually change hydration recommendations based on a person's age, weight and physical activity.

Wellness Challenges and Communities

These apps promote motivation by allowing users to participate in corporate wellness programs and interact with others. Whether it's group fitness goals or collective meditation, the social aspect helps increase accountability and engagement.

💡 To ensure a smoother adaptation process, you can add features such as tutorials and quick setup options to personalize the program based on user preferences.

Personalization and Customization

According to a study by Business of Apps, the average app retention rate drops from 23.65% on the first day to 4.13% on the 30th day for iOS apps and from 23.01% to 2.59% for Android apps. This is why app personalization and customization play a crucial role.

How to make a wellness app with personalization?

• Personal health data.
• Customizable plans.
• AI-based recommendations.

Estimating how much does it cost to make a fitness app with these personalizations can assist in planning resources and features effectively.

Integration with Wearables and IoT

In 2019, the number of smartwatch users was nearly 149 million, and by 2023, this figure had grown to 219 million. Interestingly, it is expected that by 2028, the number of users will reach 231 million. As we can see, the popularity of wearable devices is only increasing, which brings us to the next feature we want to discuss: the integration of Wearables and IoT.

Add the ability to easily connect to various wearable devices and IoT gadgets, such as fitness trackers, smartwatches, smart scales, and heart rate monitors, to your app. This integration allows for real-time data synchronization and comprehensive analysis of the user's condition.

💡 A great solution would be to include data visualization. With graphs and charts, users should be able to understand and track their metrics more easily.

Gamification and User Engagement

Gamification elements will help you motivate users to achieve new goals. Incorporate various badges and achievements, as well as rewards, into your app's design. This will help increase engagement and encourage consistent use of the app.

By focusing on these key features, your wellness app can provide a holistic and engaging experience, helping users effectively achieve their health and wellness goals. To learn more about how to build a wellness app and tailor these features to meet user needs keep reading!

Social and Community Features

The community feature in a health app promotes user engagement and motivation. A social platform right in your app allows users to share their progress, participate in challenges, support, and communicate with each other.

For example, this could include a leaderboard, group workouts, or forums for exchanging tips and experiences. Social interaction within the app creates a supportive environment, fostering long-term user retention.

Data Analytics and Reporting

With advanced data analytics and reporting tools, users can monitor their progress (which is also a portion of motivation), set goals, and get detailed insights into changes in their physical and mental health.

Want to know how to build a fitness tracking app? Go to our full guide on this topic!

And cross-platform development:

So, what framework out of all of these may be the most suitable if you want to combine the seamless performance and native features of native development with the efficiency and flexibility of cross-platform tools? While each of these frameworks has its merits, React Native offers a unique combination of benefits that are especially advantageous for many types of mobile apps. Here’s why:

• Native-like performance and experience - React Native allows developers to create apps that merge the best of web and native experiences
• Community-driven growth - React Native has a large and active community of engineers who actively contribute to its growth and improvement. This ecosystem provides access to a myriad of libraries, plugins, and solutions, empowering developers to solve complex challenges quickly and enhance their apps with new features efficiently.
• Integration of native capabilities - React Native provides a way to incorporate native code when necessary, giving you the flexibility to use device-specific features. This is particularly important for wellness apps that often rely on such functionalities to provide valuable health measurements tracking.

Choosing React Native for your wellness app means you get the best of both worlds: the performance and feel of native apps combined with the flexibility and efficiency of web development.

AI and Machine Learning

Today's wellness apps aren't just about counting steps or calories anymore. With the help of AI, they're evolving into intelligent companions that learn from your habits and health data to provide advice that's customized to fit your life and goals. Let's dive deeper into the basic technical aspects of AI and machine learning that can be utilized in wellness apps:

• Recommendation system - in wellness apps, recommendation systems powered by AI and machine learning play a crucial role in providing personalized guidance and support to users. By analyzing user data such as activity levels, dietary preferences, sleep patterns, and health goals, these systems can generate tailored recommendations. Whether suggesting personalized workout routines, nutritional advice, meditation practices, or sleep improvement strategies, recommendation systems integrated through professional meditation app development services help users navigate their wellness journey more effectively.
• Neural networks and deep learning- wellness app functionality can often be based on neural networks, a class of algorithms inspired by the human brain's structure and function. Deep learning, a subset of neural networks, utilizes multiple layers of interconnected nodes to automatically extract patterns from large datasets.
• Time series analysis and forecasting - wellness apps are frequently used to analyze time-series data, such as continuous heart rate monitoring or sleep patterns over time.
• Natural language processing (NLP) - enables users to interact with the application through voice commands or text inputs.

To implement these sophisticated AI functionalities in React Native apps, using cloud AI services is a great choice. Platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure offer a range of AI services that can be easily integrated via APIs. For instance, Amazon Rekognition provides image and video analysis, and Amazon Comprehend handles natural language processing.

Firebase ML, part of Google's mobile and web app development platform Firebase, also offers straightforward APIs for tasks like text recognition, face detection etc.. This makes it particularly user-friendly for integrating AI into mobile apps, including React Native.

Data Security and Compliance

Data security in wellness apps is paramount to safeguarding sensitive user data. This includes utilizing strong encryption protocols to ensure data confidentiality both within the app's database and during transmission over networks, alongside protection against potential attacks and leaks, implementing secure authentication mechanisms to verify user identities, and enforcing restricted access to sensitive data based on roles and permissions.

Compliance with regulatory frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States is crucial, ensuring user data is handled responsibly and transparently within the app.

Backend frameworks such as NestJS are used to develop scalable and secure server-side applications, while databases such as PostgreSQL offer robust integrated security features. On top of that, deploying on cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides additional scalability, reliability, and built-in security features.

Design and Prototyping

UI/UX Design

Creating wellness app designs and prototypes is the first step toward an intuitive and attractive user experience. This stage usually involves wireframing (sketching the app interface). Prototyping allows you to visualize how your future app will look.

💡 You can present the prototype to your focus group and refine the app at early stages based on real feedback from potential users.

Feature Selection

The main purpose of this stage is to decide on the set of features of your app. Based on the analysis of the market, competitors and the needs of your target audience, you already understand approximately which features are worth adding to your app, and which ones are useless and nobody uses them.

Technology Stack

At this stage, you will need to choose the right technology stack. We will talk about it in the next section!

HIPAA Compliance

If your app handles sensitive health data, ensure compliance with regulations like HIPAA (for the US) or GDPR (for Europe) to protect user privacy and avoid legal issues.

Development and Testing

The most responsible and challenging stage in wellness mobile app creation – is development and testing.

At this stage, you will need to choose the right technology stack. For example, at Stormotion, we work with React Native. This framework allows us to develop apps simultaneously for iOS and Android, significantly saving time and resources for our clients.

Important aspects of this stage include wearable app development, integration with APIs and wearable devices, ensuring data security, and compliance with regulations.

Thorough testing, including automated tests, user acceptance testing (UAT), and performance optimization, ensures the reliability of the app and the absence of errors.

Launch and Post-Launch Activities

App Store Optimization

The final stage, when the entire app is ready and tested, is placing the app on marketplaces such as the Apple App Store and Google Play with all necessary metadata, screenshots, and descriptions.

Marketing and Promotion

Develop a marketing strategy to increase visibility and drive downloads. Use social media, partnerships, and influencer marketing to reach your target audience.

User Onboarding

Create an onboarding experience that educates users on how to use the app effectively, highlights key features, and encourages long-term engagement.

Gather Feedback and Iterate

Additionally, after launch, the app requires constant monitoring to track bugs and regular updates. Monitoring allows you to identify and quickly fix technical issues, ensuring the smooth operation of the program and user satisfaction. Regular updates are necessary not only to fix issues but also to add new features, improve the user experience, and keep the app relevant in the market.

Cost of Creating a Wellness App

Let's move from theory to concrete numbers. How much does it cost to create a wellness app? Here is a detailed table:

As you can see, creating a wellness app will cost between $63,500 and $128,000. Even though we have tried to give you the most realistic estimates, the total cost can still vary depending on the complexity of your app development, marketing strategies, and number of features.

To make the most of your investment, it's worth partnering with a company that offers comprehensive wellness app development services tailored to your business goals.

Operating under an outstaffing model, we provided Mindance with dedicated IT resources, enabling them to manage the project’s budget and timeline effectively while benefiting from our technical expertise.

- FitTracks

A fitness application with audio instructions through voice-guided workouts for fitness enthusiasts and sporties. While most fitness apps are focused on inside-the-gym activities or home workouts to get 6-pack abs, FitTracks has a goal of turning wellness into a lifestyle. FitTracks’ online workouts have already been recognized as prevention courses by the German government. This gives users the right to ask their health insurance companies for up to 100% reimbursement of costs.

Stormotion, as a wellness app development company, assembled a team of a Designer, a Project Manager, and a React Native Developer to fit in with the project. Our core task was to deliver a user-centric product that would be consistent with the website and matching mobile behavior patterns as well. Our development team was also responsible for the full release-related support. Now the FitTracks app is available for iOS and Android users in Germany.

- Feel Amazing

Feel Amazing is a meditation and wellness application that allows users to unwind their minds, and become a better version of themselves. It provides an array of functions for improving mental health by way of guided meditations, mindfulness workouts, and health monitoring. Feel Amazing focused on simple, intuitive design.

We followed the minimum approach, creating an application that didn’t overload with soothing colors and navigation. The hybrid development approach saved development time while enabling concurrent iOS and Android deployment.