How to Build a Wellness App? A Complete Guide

Today, wellness app development services are in high demand. This is due to people's increased attention to their physical and mental health. Our company has been successfully working in this domain for more than 15 years, allowing us to accumulate a vast base of valuable knowledge. We continuously monitor market trends, and in this article, we’d like to share our expertise with you.

We will discuss different types of wellness software, highlight the key steps in the wellness app development process, and share a series of practical recommendations.

These applications can be defined as web or mobile software products that help people enhance their overall well-being by promoting a healthy lifestyle and supporting them in developing healthy behaviors.

In 2023, the global wellness and health app market reached the level of $49.78 billion. And now, with the expected CAGR of over 11% for the period from 2024 to 2030, it is projected that its size will hit $111.49 billion by 2030. 

There are different approaches to categorizing wellness apps according to the specific health needs they cater to. In our article, we invite you to consider the following types of wellness software.

1. Fitness apps: These solutions help users track their physical exercises, set fitness goals, and create workout plans. Such apps can also be enriched with video tutorials, video conferencing tools for online classes, and forums.
2. Mental health apps: These applications aim to support mental health through mood-tracking tools, stress management techniques, guided meditations, and cognitive behavioral therapy exercises.
3. Nutrition and diet apps: With features such as meal planning, calorie counting, and diet tracking, users can reach their weight-related goals much faster and with less effort. These apps also provide access to nutritional data and valuable information from professionals.
4. Sleep apps: These software products help users enhance the quality of their sleep. They typically offer functionality such as sleep tracking, sleep cycle analysis, and smart alarms.
5. Habit-tracking apps: While similar features can be added to wellness solutions of any other type, these products can also be available as stand-alone apps. They help set goals and track progress. Achievement visualization and reminders help keep users motivated.
6. Yoga and meditation apps: These solutions usually offer breathing exercises, mindfulness practices, meditation guides, and yoga tutorials for users with different levels of experience.
7. General health and medical apps: These can provide a wide range of valuable features, including but not limited to symptom tracking, medication reminders, health records management, telehealth services, comprehensive health tracking, and personalized health insights.
8. Women’s health apps: Applications of this type are traditionally enriched with tools such as menstrual cycle tracking, pregnancy tracking, and fertility monitoring.
9. Addiction recovery apps: These apps offer access to community support, motivational content, recovery exercises, and progress tracking.
10. Employee wellness apps: This special type of app can be launched by companies for their teams. Through such apps, they can implement corporate wellness programs, organize activity challenges, provide mental health support, and conduct health assessments.

When you initiate the realization of a wellness product development project, you always need to start with defining the goals of your future application. Based on this knowledge, you will be able to identify not only its type but also its functionality. Here are a couple of features that may provide you with inspiration for building your unique solution.

• Goal setting. A lot of wellness apps allow users to set wellness and fitness goals and further track their progress. As it is a rather highly demanded tool, you should also consider it for your app.
• Notifications and reminders. This a very important feature, especially for those apps that help to develop healthy habits.
• Personalized plans. This tool will create health and wellness plans based on user needs, interests, and health data.
• Tracking and monitoring. This feature may have its peculiarities in each app depending on the exact type of your solution. Some apps have activity trackers, nutrition trackers, sleep trackers, etc.
• Educational content. This section can include articles, videos, tutorials, and tips on various health and wellness topics.
• Social features. Such features can be helpful for many reasons. For example, they provide community support and motivation. That’s why you can equip your app with online chats and forums.
• Integration with wearables. Integrating your app with smartwatches and fitness bracelets allows for gathering more user health data and offering additional ways for users to interact with your app.

Wellness software development is a multi-step process that requires throughout planning and a clear understanding of the goals of your project. At Cogniteq, we usually recommend our customers take the following plan as a benchmark for software product development.

• Market research. Before initiating any activities aimed at building your health and wellness app, you need to attentively study the market. First of all, such efforts will help you to detect the current market trends and needs. You will find out what solutions are already available to users and what features are in demand. Based on the results of your research, you will be able to elaborate an excellent idea for your future app that will efficiently address the needs of your target audience.
• Discovery stage. After the market research, you should establish cooperation with a wellness application development company and discuss the terms of your work, as well as the responsibilities of both parties. Here, you should provide your requirements to the development team so that specialists can plan the entire development process. They will set key milestones and timelines for the realization of your project. The team will try to collect as much information from you as possible in order to ensure that they are on the same page with you and that they understand your needs correctly.

The development team will also help you find the most suitable tools and technologies that will be used for building your software. The choice should be based on a row of factors, such as the list of desired features and integrations, modern tendencies in software development, and the simplicity of using this and that stack.

• UI/UX design. In wellness app development, it is vital to make the solution not only visually appealing but also easy to use. That’s why designers will analyze the concept and the functionality of your future product to share their vision with you and offer you the most appropriate solution. 
• Development process. This stage is traditionally the most time-consuming one. It includes a row of iterations that allow developers to build a solution in full accordance with customers’ requirements and expectations. It is also necessary to properly test the solution. Some types of tests are conducted in parallel with development. Nevertheless, some others like regression tests are performed when everything is ready. They help to see whether none of the introduced changes caused any new defects. 
• Testing and QA. Software testing and quality assurance are very important components of the development process. A good development team will always conduct a row of tests of different types while building your product in order to detect and fix all the bugs. When all the changes are introduced, it’s time for regression testing. It will show whether everything works as it was initially expected.
• Wellness app launch. When your application is ready, well-tested, and well-protected from external threats, it can be made available to potential users. When we are talking about mobile apps, they should be published on marketplaces (Google Play and/or the App Store) where they can be found and downloaded by people. To make sure that your app will be placed there, you should be sure that it fully meets the requirements set by these platforms. 
• Post-launch support. It is also important to continuously monitor the performance of your app and timely react to any detected vulnerabilities. Moreover, you should also regularly collect and analyze the feedback from users in order to define what they think about your solutions and the way to improve them.

The cost of any software development project should be calculated based on a row of variables. When you contact a wellness application development company, you will need to provide a row of your requirements for your future product. Only after analyzing them, the development team will be able to share estimates with you.

What factors should be taken into account?

• Type of your solution;
• Number of features and integrations;
• Complexity of the functionality;
• Tech stack;
• Size and composition of the development team;
• Timelines (if you have any specific requirements).

That’s quite natural that the development of complex solutions with advanced AI or VR-powered features will cost more than the creation of simple apps with the most basic functionality.

Over the years of our work, our team has built a large number of successful wellness apps. Now, we are ready to share a list of practical tips that will help ensure the high quality of your solutions.

1. Pay attention to data privacy and security. At Cogniteq, we regularly build software that is expected to deal with sensitive data. That’s why we always pay a lot of attention to data protection methods and approaches. Our commitment to protecting private data and building secure software is proven by the ISO/IEC 27001 certification. Two-factor authentification, data encryption, as well as access control tools, are among the most widely-applied protection measures today. When you are looking for a wellness app development company, make sure that the team has strong expertise in building HIPPA and GDPR-compliant solutions.
2. Don’t skip an MVP stage. A minimum viable product is the simplest version of an app that has only basic features. By launching it and making it available to end-users, you can collect their feedback. Based on their opinion, you can understand whether you should proceed to the development of a full-scale solution in accordance with your initial idea or whether any improvements are required. Thanks to the launch of an MVP you can avoid serious financial risks associated with the release of a solution that won’t be useful and valuable for the target audience.
3. Plan the project realization properly. The better the project realization is planned, the better you will be prepared for different scenarios. The goals, stages, and peculiarities of the project should be clear to all people who are involved in it. You should think about possible pitfalls that you can face during the development and implementation processes, as well as about the ways to address them.
4. Allocate budget for marketing needs. The market of wellness apps is very dynamic and highly competitive, in order to be noticed, you need to invest in marketing. Today, there is a wide range of options for promoting your app and you shouldn’t miss them. For example, we recommend you think about promotion on social media, cooperation with influencers, and contextual ads.

If you choose us as a wellness application development company, we will do our best to deliver a solution that will go much beyond your expectations. It’s important to highlight that we have all the necessary knowledge and resources for it.

In our portfolio, there are a lot of solutions built for the health and wellness industry. One of them is an iOS app for Emergency Watch, which is a device for triggering an alarm in case of an emergency. This solution is targeted at elderly users, as well as for people of any age who want to feel safe regardless of the part of the day and the place where they are. 

This watch can call an emergency contact, provide GPS coordinates via email, and play sound. The device has only one button and the app lets users select the type of press (single-tap, double-tap, or long-press) and choose a relevant action for each of them.

Another solution that we’d like to mention is a software product of an absolutely different type. It is a cross-platform mobile app for detailed documentation of the treatment process. This software solution is an electronic medical record.

Patients, as well as members of the medical staff, can add data to it. For example, they can enter such vital indicators as pulse, weight, pressure, blood test results, distance covered per day, time of inactivity, medications taken, etc. Thanks to this, doctors get access to the whole picture of the patient’s condition and the provided treatment.

In our portfolio, you can also find such a project as TeamZWATT. In this case, we cooperated with a company that developed power metering equipment for cyclists and needed to build high-quality software for accumulating and processing sensor data. They already had an Android application.

Our team got a task to create two new applications for Android and two apps for iOS based on the existing one and also enhance the design of these solutions. The developed apps can recognize the sensor, connect it to a smartphone via Bluetooth, transmit data from the strain gauge, store it locally, and synchronize it with a server. With the help of apps, users can calibrate the sensor and check whether there are any issued bootloader and firmware updates. 

Today, the demand for wellness apps is growing which is explained by the continuously increasing interest of people in supporting their health, physical activities, nutrition habits, etc. Given this wellness app development can become a highly promising project. 

If you have plans to launch such an app and want to find a reliable wellness app development company, at Cogniteq, we are always at your disposal. With our expertise, we can cope with tasks of any type and complexity. Do not hesitate to contact us and share your ideas.