Developing a Diet and Nutrition App- A complete guide

People keep procrastinating going to the gym and fitness centers. In such cases, Diet and Nutrition applications are a huge hit.

According to reports, It’s projected that by the year 2023, the revenue generated by a particular market segment will soar to almost $5 billion. This promising growth trend is expected to remain steady and stable, with an annual Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.28% till 2027.

If your company has a successful solution that caters to the needs of this market segment, it can become a part of this multi-billion-dollar industry. Furthermore, you will have the opportunity to offer a highly useful product to potential customers that will undoubtedly add value to their lives.

So, it’s worth considering taking advantage of this lucrative opportunity and tapping into this market segment, which promises significant potential for growth and revenue.

Diet App Ideas

There are tons of diet and nutrition apps out there. They all have different functionality and also cater to different age groups. We have shortlisted some of the best ideas to include while developing your diet and nutrition app.

Calorie calculating apps

Such apps keep track of the number of calories consumed as well as burnt during a day. The app also helps its users with dietary recommendations.

One of the best examples of a calorie counting app is MapMyFitness. It has over 11.7 million users to prove its efficiency and popularity.

Social platform apps

These apps allow users to get in touch with dieticians and nutritionists directly. These professionals help users with suggestions and instructions regarding their diets.
Rise is an example of such an app where the user pays the diet coaches and experts so that they can guide them to follow a strict diet regime and track their progress over a period.

Apps for meal planning

These apps are used for managing diets through a diet chart. The app prepares a diet plan for a day, week or month keeping in mind your body type, weight target, and food preferences.
Diet Assistant and Eat this Much is an example of diet planning apps.

Diet and Fitness Apps for a Niche Audience

Usually, apps are made for the general audience. They are unable to cater to people with specific diets or requirements. You can develop a mobile application targeting audiences with such special needs. For example- pregnant women, Diabetes patients, Heart patients, etc.

Features of a Diet and Nutrition App

The unique features and responsiveness play a huge role in determining the success of an application. You need to ensure the features of your mobile application adds to its user experience and engagement.

Here are the features you can include while developing a diet and nutrition app to stand apart from your competitors.

1. Registration

Creating a profile on the diet and nutrition app is the first step. The users will need to create a detailed profile to get started. Information like age, gender, height, weight, food allergies, desired goal, any illness and so on.

To make signing-in as convenient as possible, you must provide options via Facebook, email, Google account or phone number.

2. Integration with Wearable devices

Wearable devices like FitBit are popular to track daily physical activities. The integration of your app with wearable devices will make your app stand out in the competition.

Wearable devices are also essential as they track and record vital information such as blood pressure, distance walked, pulse, etc automatically. Without wearables, the user will have to enter some details manually which would be both tiring and inaccurate.

3. Push Notifications

Excess and unnecessary use of push notifications can annoy your customers and lose your app users. On the other hand, the timely and efficient use of push notifications can help in retaining customers and earn loyalty.

You must use push notifications to remind the users about their workout schedules and meal timings. Motivating and encouraging them through notifications can help your users follow their set diet and workout regime.

4. Personalized Diet Plans

The mobile application must be an expert and efficient in its basic functionality. Once the user specifies the desired weight, food habits, and body type, your app must be able to provide them with a diet plan accordingly. The diet must be considerate about the user’s preferred food and allergies if any.

5. Track Progress

The user’s progress must be monitored after regular short intervals and the diet must be updated accordingly. Following the same diet for a long period will make the user bored and irritant. Updating the diet will show genuine concern for your app users and create engagement.

6. Help

There are times when even in this tech-savvy era, people have difficulties using an application and require assistance. Also, your target audience might not be restricted to millennials.
Your diet and nutrition app must have a help section with FAQs and user manual. You can add a chat section if a user has any further questions or inquiries.

7. Feedbacks

Ratings and reviews help an app improve and a diet and nutrition application is no exception. Feedbacks from your users is the best way to work on your application for a smoother experience.

You also get to know what the users expect from your diet and nutrition application. You can also consider adding a desired feature to increase the engagement of the users.

5 Stages of Diet & Nutrition Development

Developing a fitness app with nutrition recommendations can be an excellent opportunity for non-tech product owners. However, it can be overwhelming, especially for those who are not familiar with the technicalities involved. But with the right approach, it is possible to create an effective and successful fitness app. Here are the essential steps to follow:

1. Prototype

When it comes to building a diet and nutrition app, starting with an interactive prototype is an excellent approach for non-tech product owners. A prototype is a click-through version of your product that exists purely in design, with no coding involved.

Prototyping has several benefits. Firstly, you can run the prototype through usertesting.com or similar services to gauge if the application resonates with your target audience before investing in coding. This saves time and resources and ensures that you are creating something that your potential users will love.

Moreover, you can obtain feedback from developers during the prototyping phase to ensure that the design is feasible and to make necessary adjustments before development begins. This is important because development is the most expensive part of any project, including diet and nutrition apps.

2. Development

Custom development of an app is undoubtedly a crucial and sometimes tedious step, but it is also the most significant part of creating a functional and effective diet and nutrition app. Here are some essential points to consider during this process:

i. Back End Development

As you may already know, any mobile solution comes with a back end, where essential features like database, logic, APIs, and other technical components reside. However, your back end may also include an admin portal, which allows you to manage the content of your app effectively.

The admin portal is a critical part of your diet and nutrition app, as it enables you to manage the content displayed on your app, user interactions, and other back-end operations. Here are some of the essential features that you may want to include in your admin portal:

1. User Management: This feature enables you to manage user accounts and block/unblock offensive content. It allows you to keep the app safe and secure for all users.
2. Educational Content: Your diet and nutrition app should provide users with informative and educational content related to their health and wellbeing. With an admin portal, you can manage and update the articles and educational content displayed on your app.
3. Notifications Management: Notifications are an essential part of any mobile app, as they keep users engaged and informed. With an admin portal, you can manage the notifications sent to users and keep them up-to-date on the latest app updates and content.

ii. Integration

To make your diet tracking and nutrition app truly valuable to users, it needs to integrate with third-party services, smart devices, and native mobile operating system features. Here are some ways you can achieve this:

1. Integrating IoT Capabilities: Pulling data from connected scales and various activity trackers provides users with a comprehensive picture of their calorie expenditure. To enable these capabilities, your app will need to use BLE (Bluetooth low energy) technology.
2. Leveraging Native Mobile OS Features: A nutrition application can benefit greatly from utilizing native mobile operating system features such as HealthKit (iOS), Google Fit (Android), and Samsung Health. These features allow the app to track and display various health metrics to users.
3. Utilizing Siri Shortcuts and Google Assistant Integrations: These integrations allow users to input data quickly using voice commands, which saves them time and effort. It also provides a more seamless experience for users.
4. Implementing Widgets: Widgets are a great way to display critical information to users without them having to open the app. They can show things like daily calorie intake, water consumption, or the number of steps taken in a day.

By integrating these features into your diet tracking and nutrition app, you can provide a more comprehensive and valuable experience for your users, which will ultimately lead to higher engagement and retention rates.

iii. Artificial Intelligence

If you’re looking to take your diet tracking and nutrition app to the next level, you might want to consider incorporating AI capabilities. Here are a few examples of how AI can enhance your app:

1. Personalized User Progress Visualization: Machine learning algorithms can help you visualize personalized user progress into the future based on their current behavior registered in your app. This can provide users with a clearer picture of their long-term goals and motivate them to stay on track.
2. Intelligent Assistant: AI can also be used to create an intelligent assistant that offers advice on how consumers can change their eating habits to get better results. This assistant could analyze users’ dietary preferences and provide them with personalized recommendations on how to achieve their goals.
3. Automated Food Recognition: Another way to use AI in your app is by incorporating automated food recognition. This feature would allow users to take a photo of their meals, and the app would recognize the food and log it into their daily intake automatically.

These are just a few examples of how AI can enhance your diet tracking and nutrition app. By incorporating these features, you can create a more personalized and engaging experience for your users, which can lead to higher user engagement and retention rates.

iv. Smart Watch Companion

It’s true that many of the top nutrition apps also offer a smartwatch companion app or standalone solution for Apple Watch and Android Wear devices. There are several advantages to incorporating a smartwatch app into your product.

3. Testing

Testing app is essential to ensure it functions seamlessly, but it can be a daunting task to test an application with various devices, screen sizes, and operating systems. The exhaustive list of possible scenarios can make your head spin.

Therefore, delegating the testing process to professionals is highly recommended. They possess the knowledge and expertise to conduct various types of testing, including manual and automated tests, which detect issues early in the development process. They also have access to specialized testing platforms that can test your app on multiple devices simultaneously.

A QA team that takes their job seriously can deliver superior products compared to others while saving you time and resources. So, trust the experts to ensure your nutrition and diet tracking app is bug-free and ready for launch.

4. RElease

After completing development and testing, the final step is to launch your app on the App Store and Google Play. This is an exciting moment for any app owner as it’s the culmination of all the hard work that has gone into creating the product.

Before launching your app, you’ll need to switch your server to a live environment and ensure that it has been stress-tested to handle user traffic. Once your app is live, customers can download and start using it.

5. Feedback, Maintenance & tracking metrics

Once your app is released to the public, there are a few important things to keep track of. Firstly, it’s important to monitor where your users are coming from and how they are interacting with your app. You also need to stay on top of any issues that could harm the user experience, as well as track the number of users who stick with the application.

To effectively monitor these metrics, you should consider using a DIY guide to track mobile app metrics or investing in a platform that can help you do so.

Another crucial aspect of post-release maintenance is planning for future features and updates that can support the latest iOS and Android features. Keeping your app up to date is important for staying relevant in the market and maintaining user satisfaction.

Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that bugs are inevitable. Despite rigorous testing, there may still be some rare issues that arise on certain devices. To address this, consider using a service like Sentry to automatically track errors and quickly pinpoint problematic areas in your app. With these steps in place, you can ensure the long-term success of your mobile app.

Ways to Earn Money from you Diet & Nutrition App

When it comes to making money with food and fitness apps, there are several options available to app owners.

1. In-app Advertising

One method is in-app advertising, where ads are displayed within the app interface. App owners get paid based on the number of ad impressions or clicks. This method is suitable for apps that are used frequently.

2. In-app Purchases

Another option is through in-app purchases, where users can buy additional features or bonuses. However, this method requires a loyal user base who are willing to pay for additional features.

3. Paid Subscriptions

Paid subscriptions have gained popularity recently and offer another way to monetize apps. Users pay for access to the app, and according to Localytics, the subscription model can be more profitable than other models.

4. Freemium Model

The freemium model is also an option, where users get access to basic functionality for free, but have to pay for full access to all features.

It’s important to choose the right monetization model for your app based on its functionality, target users, and other factors. While these are some of the most common methods, there are other options available depending on your app’s unique features and goals.

Conclusion

There are already a few fitness and diet apps out in the market doing great. But there are still unexplored opportunities to excel in. In conclusion, developing a diet and nutrition app with an engaging interface, pleasing UI/UX and unique features is going to be a game-changer.To achieve all this, you would require the help and guidance of a mobile application development firm that can deliver it at a minimal cost.

Idea Usher comprises a pool of talented professionals who would deliver all your requirements with their top-notch skills combined with our cutting-edge technology. We have years of deep-rooted experience and are experts in our field. We also develop other customized applications like the Dating app, Food delivery app, Uber-like taxi service app, Flower delivery app, etc. Get in touch with us on contact@ideausher for further information.