Wellness App Development: Types & How to Choose

Wellness applications help you to make your life better directly, improving your health, mind, and body. People love being healthy, beautiful, strong, and happy and love tools that help them reach these qualities. So, you can use it! 

Wellness app developers include various companies, one of which you can check by following the link. As you’ll see, if you decide to enter this industry, you can also find a freelancer and contact healthcare specialists for the consultation.

Wellness Apps Overview

This application type is characterized by high diversity. How many approaches for improving your life can you offer? Try to think about the mind and body, remember all potential physical and mental diseases, from flu to depression, and all methods of improving muscle mass and mental well-being. Also, you probably know several approaches to self-organization, such as Pomodoro techniques. Remember breathing, sleep, and nutrition as two basic areas which support your physical body alive and functional. 

And then – generate as many ways to improve all of this as possible. The result will surprise you. After such an experiment, let’s see five popular examples of such apps. Wellness app development focuses on creating mobile applications that cater to health, fitness, mental well-being, and overall holistic wellness.

Fitness Apps are widely used for training, physical activity tracking, and many other purposes. Yoga apps are often united with them, as they serve similar purposes. MyFitnessPal is a typical example with a wide range of functions and a large list of exercises and meals beneficial for body improvement. It is currently the most popular type of wellness app.

Nutrition apps instead track users’ calorie intake and plan meal schedules. Lists of food, with calorie and nutrition analysis, as well as various tips, are their essential features. Fooducate is a good example, but MyFitnessPal has various nutrition app features as well.

Sleep apps track sleep patterns and can be adjusted to react to particular sleep phases, for example, to wake the user up in the right phase. They also provide various tips and information connected with sleep. Check the Sleep Cycle to see them in action.

Healthcare apps are those used by medical organizations to help their clients, as well as various services that facilitate physical and mental disease management, from small problems to serious cases. More serious examples are telemedicine apps for direct contact with doctors and medical decisions. Medisafe is a robust example of a healthcare application: it helps with medication taking, provides telehealth services, and personalizes the medical information for each patient.

Self-care apps are a diverse group of tools for building healthy habits, tracking behavior, and planning one’s life. Healthy food, clear life goals, vacation planning, and many more are essential components of a happy life. These applications use notifications and gamification to show users what they should do and why. See Habitica and Happify as examples of different types of self-care apps.

Overall, their aim is to promote and improve one’s health and well-being and is used to track, monitor, and improve various aspects of life. Along with mentioned tools, there are yoga and meditation apps, which are only briefly mentioned, and many more. But these five types are enough to let you dive into the wellness app development of these tools.

Who Uses Them?

Wellness apps become an integral part of life for those who care for their health. See the statistics of the U.S. regular users below.

While it is the 2021 statistics, it shows the tendency of growing. Small decline is clearly connected with the COVID-19 pandemic. The tendency is worldwide, despite in various countries there can be different rates. Along with the United States, these apps are especially popular in China and India.

In addition, according to other statistics, younger people are much more satisfied by the wellness apps results. So, your target audience will probably be young.

Lastly, well-being service providers, such as fitness centers, yoga studios, coaches, clinics, and physicians, are also big users of these apps. You can cooperate with them in the development of your app and then provide your services for them, having a great commission.

Who Makes Them?

Wellness applications can be created actually by everyone. You can learn all necessary skills, such as QA testing, UI/UX design, and JavaScript, become familiar with React Native, and participate in the development yourself. But in any case, you’ll need a team. You’ll need a partner, in most cases. A company, team, or individual who will support your strategy, develop your code and design, and correct your inevitable mistakes.

Let’s see the list of who typically makes them.

• App development companies will be your preferable choice. While there are specialized wellness app development companies that focus on creating fitness, medical, sleep, and other related applications, some of them provide various services. You can think of it as a universal team with proficiencies in various areas, and choose the one which has the proficiency in the wellness industry. There are designers, developers, and quality assurance professionals who work together to build and launch the app.
• Individual freelancers who specialize in design and development can be a cheap and flexible alternative. You can find the developer you need and ask them to follow your development plan, or hire several specialists and integrate them in your team.
• Hire a wellness professional: this is the unusual case, but they may have technical skills or their own developer teams. Examples are some modern fitness trainers, proficient in modern technology and development, including nutritionists, therapists, or wellness coaches. Their clear benefit is the firsthand knowledge of the industry and its specific needs. 

When it comes to companies that develop wellness applications, they can range from small startups focusing solely on wellness to larger companies that offer a range of products and services. These companies may support you on all development stages with their established experience. Freelancers, on the other hand, may offer a more flexible development schedule, based on tasks you’ll allocate to them.

Find a Developer Company

Well, it is easy to find an extremely diverse choice and lists of various companies. What to notice when contacting them?

• Portfolio is important to evaluate what you’ll obtain from the company in the end.
• Reviews to see the experience of its past users and understand their feelings.
• Communication efficiency, which includes how quickly and clearly the company’s representatives answer and how good they are involved in the development process with your own team.
• Specializations to understand whether the company can work in the wellness industry and know its peculiarities. 

Counting these four simple points can save you from the disappointment and frustrations.

Find a Freelancer

Another option is to find a freelancer – or several of them. In that case, your workflow will be built on the interaction between a freelancer and your own team, and the success will depend on how well they’ll be integrated.

Use websites such as Upwork, Guru, and Freelancer to search for possible partners or, which is probably even better, find an appropriate connection on LinkedIn. There, you can communicate with various people directly, become familiar, evaluate their skills, and select the one with whom you’ll feel the right connection.

Compare a Price

The choice between hiring a wellness app development company or a freelancer depends on factors such as task number and complexity, timing, and specification. 

• A freelancer will propose their hourly rate, or in some cases, you’ll communicate the end price for each project stage.
• A company will calculate all expenses, and hidden costs, and propose you an end price in the early development stages. This end price will probably be larger than that which you can achieve working with freelancers, but it will be much more reliable.

A typical price range for the wellness app is from $30,000 to $100,000.

How to Choose the Right Company

In most cases, hiring a freelancer or even a freelance team seems a cheaper and better option; however, we suggest you consider a company instead. A freelancer team is a good choice if you need something to be done quickly, but for a large and highly specialized project, such as the wellness app, a company will be able to count many more variables. 

You’ll find better communication, a larger experience, including the specific one in your chosen industry, and more precise cost evaluation. And, what is no less important, testing and long-term support of your app. These are crucial factors for your success.

We recommend you hire freelancers only in the case when they have knowledge of the wellness industry. In addition, you should be sure that there will be long-term relationships and that your app will be supported and maintained after being developed.

Conclusion

Wellness apps are diverse in their forms, types, missions, and destinations. If you can find a way to improve people’s well-being, become familiar with it, and organize the development of the app, which will realize this – welcome to the industry! We recommend you choose a company proficient in your chosen industry and connect with it for the price and strategy negotiation. It will ensure you good support during the wellness app development and maintenance after the release, as well as smart tips for your specification.