Ready, Set, Go! How fitness apps became our coaches?

October 04 12:28 2017 by Helen Johnson Print This Article

Do you go in for sports? Visit a gym or go to pilates at least a couple of days a week? Do you have a fitness tracker? Or is there any fitness application installed on your smartphone? In the majority of cases, the answer will be “yes”.

Starting from 2014, sport and healthy lifestyle start to develop fast and become more and more popular as well as the mobile market. According to Flurry Analytics, the platform for consumer behavior analysis through data observations, the number of sport fans increased by 80%. So, sport has become a mainstream and the IT field, especially mobile software industry, contributed and still keep on contributing to it skyrocket.

Nowadays, more than 165,000 fitness and health-related applications are available only on Apple Store. Besides, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital company, expects that by the end of 2017 30% of consumers in the USA will have a fitness or healthcare device to monitor blood and heart rate, to track physical activity and to control other parameters. According to the Nilson Report, the provider of news and analysis of payment industries, the global health and fitness application market reached $4 billion in 2014 and it is expected to gain $26 billion by the end of current year. The growing demand leads to market offering increase.

By purposes, fitness applications can be of several types: activity trackers, diet and nutrition applications, sleep trackers, solutions for workout and exercise. Each application type provides certain functionality but all of them have common specific features that are obligatory for the fitness and healthcare products.

Common feature of healthcare and fitness software:

an account with personal data to have information synchronized between different devices
an option of social sharing to enable users to demonstrate their high results and keep them motivated
push notifications to call users to action and push them to reach their goals

Besides, activity tracking applications have the feature of geolocation implemented for users to see the number of kilometers and the route they have run, cycled or walked. Due to HealthKit and Google Fit, the applications are able to collect and store weight history, number of steps, duration of activities, heartbeat rate, number of burnt calories. Also, they usually support the data integration with wearable devices.

In order to be convenient for users, diet and nutrition applications have barcode scanner for purchases and food logging. The feature of a shopping list creating is also useful if there is an in-build database of most common products and dishes. Besides, the interface should be easy-to-understand and intuitively clear. These aspects are taken into account during the application creating.

The development of fitness and healthcare applications includes several stages that ensure their market success. Everything starts from data gathering and analyzing – market research, latest trends, user’s needs and your competitors’ products. On the basis of reviewed data, the project documentation is prepared. When designers created the UX and UI part of the application according to available documentation, the development team starts to implement the idea into the real life.

To make sure that the system operates properly, the QA team performs a set of tests to verify different aspects of the ready application. They test its usability, performance, security, etc. The main goal of testing activity is to detect any mismatches and malfunctions of software product and make sure that all of them were removed without causing side-effects.

After completed software testing, the application is released to end users and they are able to track their steps, monitor daily activity, thus, feel fit and be in a good shape.