The amount of physical labor has decreased due to technology, which has become the root cause of numerous health issues. Having good health and a balanced lifestyle has become important. The value of income from wellness applications increases as quickly as the number of people who are trying to be fit. According to Statista, the global market size of mobile health is projected to hit USD 100 billion in 2021. This figure amounted to USD 21 billion in 2016. The report shows that health, wellness, fitness, and lifestyle solutions have evolved exponentially in the last few years. What is even more promising is that these figures are predicted to almost double in the coming years.
People don't need dietary and nutrition specialists, as apps provide people with fully customized advice. Wellness apps help keep a watchful eye on what you eat and how much you eat, making them an ideal companion for you. It is so popular today that you always come across people of all ages using mobile apps as a support device in their day-to-day fitness and workout commitments. It is an artificial intelligence solution that helps and inspires people to follow a fitness regime. Smart devices are available with a range of applications and tools to monitor the daily diet and nutrition habits of people.
What Are Diet And Nutrition Applications And How Do They Work?
Diet and fitness applications allow individuals to have a balanced diet. Take HealthifyMe for example. It is a wellness app that helps users to lose weight and get fit. Cure Fit is a nutritional facts app that recognizes foods that fulfill consumer needs, expectations, and lifestyles. Another great example, according to Statista, is MyFitnessPal, which was the leading health and wellness app of 2019. MyFitnessPal helps users to assess the calorie content of foods and change their eating patterns in order to be healthy.
There are various types of nutritional applications, including calorie tracker, diet tracker, meal calendars, and online sites that connect users and wellness mentors. There are also specialized applications: maternity health apps, building muscle meal apps, vegan diet apps, and obesity trackers, for example. Essentially, a diet and nutrition app allows its users to keep records of daily food intake, control calorie consumption, provide advice on health and healthy food, build a customized meal plan, interact with the finest nutritionists and dieticians near them, know the nutrients in their diet, etc.
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Why Invest In Developing A Diet And Nutritional Application
Diet and health technologies are very common, but their competition is strong. The prominence of wellness apps has increased over the last three years. Over this time, according to research, the participation rate for these apps has risen by 330 percent.
According to Statista, the prevalence of obesity among 20-year-olds in various parts of the world increased from 19.4% to 31.3% between 1997 and 2017. As a result, there are a ton of folks who want to improve their health and change their eating habits, and you have an opportunity to build a value-added diet and wellness app. In one of the Statista articles, statistics indicate that about 26 percent of people frequently use a diet and nutrition tracking app in order to monitor their diet and wellness in 2017, while 27 percent use the app sometimes.
According to a new study, the global mHealth market which was estimated at $40.7 billion last year is projected to hit $316.8 billion in 2027, with an annual growth rate of 29.2%. In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic time, life came to a complete halt with governments implementing lockdowns. So, in order to remain healthy and preserve their immunity, people need to exercise and track their daily intake of food via a mobile app.
Who Uses Diet And Nutrition Applications?
Mhealth has become popular today because it is used by mobile app users of all ages as a chest strap in their day-to-day workout and exercise obligations. Discover your target group before developing a nutrition tracking app. Learn their dynamics and the obstacles that they face in delivering a one-of-a-kind approach. Given below is the estimated data on who uses nutrition apps. And this image is just an approximate one. For making a unique diet and wellness application, it is essential for you to know who you are trying to reach out to with the app.
Mobile apps users are youth. Statista reports that 26% of people aged 18 to 29 use balanced diet tools on a regular basis and 17% of people aged 30 to 45 use meal prepping tools regularly. According to a study, the most common objectives of people are to monitor their physical activity, eating habits, and weight.
In this post, you will learn about the main features of a health app and how to conquer the giants in the mHealth app industry.
Types Of Nutrition Applications
The foremost task before deciding on the features of an application is to decide the type of health application you want to develop. Based on this, the target audience and features can be decided. There are several diet applications that are available on app stores. Some applications have a small variation in their basic features. Also, they appeal to various target markets. We have prepared a list of some apps that are at the top of the graph.
1. Diet Planner Apps
Develop customized meal plans with nutrition planner apps and eat healthily. These apps enable users, unlike calorie tracker apps, to fill in their food habits and budget in order to get the best meal plan.
2. Calorie Counter App
The primary function of these types of apps, as the name implies, is to count calories. A user can enter their target, which is generally the weight, in this app. Other details such as their movements and the food that they consume are added later. The app tests the number of calories consumed and burned and then offers dietary guidelines to users.
3. Social Apps
To provide users with a personalized approach to improving their health, these applications facilitate communication with diet coaches and nutritionists online to help users to keep a better track of their calories and diets.
4. Special Features Apps
Pregnant women or patients with chronic conditions are among the most vulnerable people who need careful treatment and nutrition. These special dietary apps targeting particular audiences are highly successful.
5. Integrated Features Apps
This venture can be costly but highly successful. These applications are incorporated with all the features from the calorie counter with special needs applications. It becomes an all-in-one place for health enthusiasts by just switching modes.
The Must-Have Features Of A Health-Nutrition Application
1. Must-Have Features
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Advanced User Account Or Registration
Customization is a key advantage of any diet and fitness app. That is why the primary objective of a diet app should be to collect and evaluate user data. Registration is typically the very first part that is done in an app. The ideal user profile must contain all the data on an individual's health condition much like visiting a nutritionist, i.e. gender, age, weight, body specifications, level of activity, medical history, etc. This knowledge will facilitate the experience of using your diet control app much more effectively.
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Integration With Fitness Bands
These tools are equipped with a digital diet and wellness app that automatically records vital data such as calories burned, heart rate, or pulse rate. This has become a must-have function for mobile applications as fitness apps in order to succeed with technology integration. From 325 million in 2016 to 722 million by 2020, the volume of linked wearable technology has more than tripled in four years globally. As per Statista, the expected amount will cross over 1 billion in 2022. So, make a clever decision and incorporate compatibility in your app for wearable technology.
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Food Logging And Calorie Counter
Users ought to be able to assess their eating patterns. The Food Dictionary and the Calorie Tracker are the two key interoperability aspects that help to keep track of what a user eats, and serves the main function. Using a food tracking software development feature with a calorie and fluid intake calculator, users can monitor their improvement on a dashboard. The ideal dashboard should be aesthetically attractive and contain only the most relevant details.
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Help And Feedback Section
First impressions matter, so in order to render an app enticing from the first look, make the onboarding easy. When users get confused or have concerns about their intended diet plan, the support section may be used to guide them. Make sure that the tutorials provide clear guidance to users about how to engage with your app. In addition to onboarding, add a support button in case users have issues. Add FAQs, online tutorials, and maybe a chat service to answer their queries.
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Push Notifications
Why will you use push notifications in health and wellness apps? First, push notifications are successful in growing user retention and interaction. Second, the Diet Log App should provide updates on progress towards the current goal of users and inspire them to keep working towards their goal by encouraging them to record what they consume. Think about the intensity of alerts carefully so that users don't find them annoying. Otherwise, users are going to block them. Not a good situation for investment, isn't it?
2. Nice-To-Have Features
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Easy Food Logging Features
How do you create an app with easy food logging? People don't want to spend their valuable time and energy entering the foods that they have eaten. That is why incorporating the best way to update meals is a positive idea to implement. One choice is to allow users to input details on all the ingredients of a meal after they cook it. Secondly, let the user add references to their favorite meals and automatically scan for and record their ingredients in the application.
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More Advanced Food Logging Features
The introduction of advanced technologies helps developers to enhance the food tracking experience in a mobile app. For example, OCR uses a device image in order to extract text from an image automatically. The built-in barcode scanner lets users count calories and see detailed nutritional info. You can provide these extra features in the form of a paid version while offering free services to the public. This is a smart way to monetize and bring value to your mobile app.
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Go Old-School - Blogs
On your blog, you can share dietary tips, articles, and the recent science on food and nutrition. If your content is considered to be interesting by consumers, they will share it on social media, and thereby promote your content to their friends and family. By posting their achievements and mistakes while maintaining a balanced diet, you will encourage your users to link to your blog.
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Dietary Recommendations And Food Search
Add customized dietary tips to make your mobile application even more valuable. Another way to engage users is to add a live chat feature with nutritionists. Secondly, healthy foods can take time to prepare. This isn't going to be an issue if your diet app helps people to find or include recipes for nutritious food from local restaurants.
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Pre-Made Diet Plans
An in-app cookbook could probably be useful for your food tracker app. Many people want a diet and fitness app not only to count calories but also to help them to maintain a balanced diet. This is where food plans come in handy. Usually, the diet plan contains dietary advice, food recommendations, estimated total calorie consumption, and recipes.
What's more, there is a potential to enhance this progress. The app can provide users with step-by-step voice guidance while they cook simultaneously in the kitchen. Add speech recognition functionality to allow users to request that they repeat instructions without the need to stain their device.
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Community Feature And Gamification
Consider adding game features in order to improve user engagement and interaction. Social media, as well as a community, will allow users to share their views, goals, and observations. Users are more encouraged to gain points if they can reclaim them on exclusive features or customized meal plans. You can use stars, badges, and ranks to award users for accomplishments such as target completion or weight loss.
Whom To Reach Out To For The Development Of Wellness Apps? An Evaluation Of The Cost Of Application Development
It all comes down to the money at the end of the day. Obviously, without sacrificing on efficiency, you want to create an app with a minimal cost. A food and health app cannot be a standardized solution, thus, the issue of how much it costs to create a diet app must be addressed individually for each specific instance. The key price-setting considerations will include the concept itself, the features that you need to incorporate, the artificial intelligence solution, the technology that you select, the architecture of the software, and the operating system for which your software is designed.
After you have the responses, you can head out to a custom software development company to get the complete capital costs.
To create a good mobile diet and fitness app, you need a professional team that is capable of managing such dedicated projects. You can do this by contacting a reputable and professional custom software development company or by recruiting diet and fitness app developers. The cost of any app is difficult to estimate since it depends on several variables. The most important aspect is the complexity of the app.
With a rise in sophistication, the cost of an app will begin to expand. There are various frameworks, technology stacks, functions, designs, and platforms. All of this affects the cost of creating your nutrition app. Your software development team, its size, and its location matter, too. There are software developers that bill on an hourly basis, and there are also companies who are versatile and who assist with estimating project costs on a one-time basis. Besides, the cost of the software often varies greatly depending on the geographical position of an application development company.
Check the portfolio and the input of customers in both cases to see how they work. Discuss in-depth the particular application specifications before the software development process begins. Only choose the developers of a trustworthy company in order to create nutrition apps.
The Bottom Line
Now you will be fully alert and prepared to get to work with developing a diet and nutrition tracking app. Diet and health mobile apps have an enormous reach, as consumers are searching for easier ways to track their intakes and stay active, particularly now with COVID lockdowns which means that developing a diet and nutrition app is certainly a lucrative choice. You can either contact a mobile app development company or employ nutrition app developers to do so. Since there are sufficient choices available, it is recommended that you choose the one that offers you the highest return on investment. You should make sure of the same by reviewing the first-hand testimonials of your clients and looking at their previous work. Choose it responsibly!
