Fitness Social Network

There are going to be 86 million fitness apps users in the USA alone by 2022. Largely as a result of the widespread availability of devices such as smartwatches, fitness apps have become a huge hit.

There are multiple types of fitness apps such as nutrition tracking apps, workout apps, and activity tracker apps. There are many fitness apps that are actually a combination of these categories but by and large fitness apps generally fall into these categories.

Fitness apps generally allow users to pair their smartwatches with the app for GPS tracking, heartbeat and body vitals monitoring, and other physiological parameters tracking. Users can keep challenging themselves and achieve better stats. As users can measure their fitness progress, they can strive for better. What gets measured gets managed.

Many fitness-related businesses themselves offer fitness apps, such as Workout apps offered by Gyms to their members, fitness tracking apps offered by healthcare-related companies, and dedicated fitness apps offered by innovative entrepreneurs.

Today we are trying to understand the fitness app, Strava. Strava positions itself as the social network for athletes. You can join fitness-related local clubs, explore and undertake the goals set up by each of these clubs, and share & measure with your friends for each other’s respective fitness goals.

What is Fitness Apps Development?

Before deciding on the type of fitness app you want to create, you should understand what fitness apps are. Fitness apps focus on providing fitness-related services and enhancing fitness-related activities such as exercise, jogging, running, etc. With the advent of smartwatches, a user can track and measure his body vitals such as heart rate, calories, and other parameters to know the impact of the fitness activity across shorter and longer time periods. There are multiple types of fitness apps on the market with various functions.

Features such as heartbeat monitoring, GPS-based distance monitoring, Blood sugar monitoring, Custom workout providers, diet & caloric tracking are some of the major features of many types of fitness apps.

Depending on the userbase you want to target, you can design the appropriate fitness app. We are going to focus on fitness app development like Strava that combines a social network aspect along with fitness tracking features.

Major Features of Fitness Social Network Apps Like Strava:

Social Login

An app like Strava should have easy login and the ability to transfer contacts and connections from other social networks.

Cross-Posting:

To attract new users, users can share their fitness goals and journey on other social platforms.

Social Feed:

A social feed of other connected users on the fitness social network app so that users can collectively track each other’s fitness goals and access multimedia posted by other users.

Progress Sharing:

users can share their fitness goals, milestones and share it as an attractive social post for more engagement and a sense of communal competition.

A proposed interface for fitness app development

Recording Activities:

Fitness activities such as running or workouts can be measured and shared automatically with the selected group or connections. This recording will be shared across social platforms with the user’s consent

Create Groups:

Users can create groups in the fitness social network to share their fitness goals and journey with others. Groups can be for fitness goals, of common friends and family and fitness buddies based out of the workplace, Gym, or other types of commonality.

Create Common Milestones and Achievements:

Users can compete with each other on common milestones and achievements, for example, weight loss milestones with a timeline to see who reaches the target weight first. This will combine an element of social competitiveness along with a higher sense of accountability to fitness goals.

Payment Gateway:

For premium features and other upgrades, the payment gateway needs to be integrated into the app. In case eCommerce features are to be added as well, payment gateways which can accept all major types of payments will be a necessity.

Push Notifications:

Users can get instant push notifications about the upcoming workouts, progress from friends, updates about their milestones and fitness goals on an instant basis through push notifications from the fitness social network.

Heatmaps:

This feature can be especially useful for cyclists who can use heatmaps to check out their favorite spots and common journeys. Heatmaps can be analyzed based on time spent, common locations, and preferred trails.

Custom User Profiles:

Users can keep track of all their activities, nutrition and fitness stats, linking of smartwatches and devices, and other personal information. Other features such as adding personal photos, avatars and adding connections and friends within the profile.

Device Integration:

Devices such as smartwatches can be integrated into the app so that the data can be shared between the device and app. Data can be presented to the user with inbuilt analytics.

Analytics:

Fitness analytics feature can provide users with compiled data on fitness activities, workouts performed, and other analytics for enhanced fitness goal set up through the app.

Goal Setting:

Goal setting and setting up of milestones within the app so that fitness goals can be set up tracked, and achieved.

Tech Stack:

Here is a proposed tech stack for the social fitness app. The final tech stack may differ from this one.

Conclusion

Creating a fitness social app like Strava is a massive opportunity for app entrepreneurs. Fitness apps are booming as smartwatches allow users to track and record all sorts of physical activities. If you are looking to create your own feature-rich fitness app, do drop us a line below so we can provide a free NDA-backed consultation to polish your idea further.