Diet and Nutrition App Development: Must Have Features & Cost Estimation
- Mobile
- June 27, 2018
At a time when health has become more important than wealth, people worldwide are looking to adopt a healthier lifestyle. And yes, your Smartphone devices are the best experts today that can help you in maintaining a fit regime.
Today, when people have very busy schedules, they can rely on different applications to track their diet and nutrition habits. Yes, it’s very important to maintain a well balanced diet. The diet and nutrition apps will keep a vigil on what you are consuming and in what quantity.
The diet and nutrition app can be a great companion for people who are striving hard to achieve a perfect shape of the body. This mobile application will help people of all age groups playing a supportive role to your daily workout and exercising.
According to the stats released by Statista, about 26% of Americans regularly use an app to track their diet and nutrition in 2017, whereas 27% use the app occasionally.
Usually, you expect the diet app to focus on these vital aspects:
- Preparing a proper diet chart
- Healthy food suggestions and intake
- Water consumption
- Carbohydrate and fat control or weight loss
- Tracking of the calorie
- Monitoring the physical activity
- Shopping list organizer
The Features that You Must Implement in Diet App
The Registration Page
So, the first step towards developing a diet and nutrition app is creating a registration page where the users can easily log-in into their accounts by entering the basic details. The details would basically include the age, gender, height, weight and eating habits etc.
You can enter other details such as whether you are addicted to smoking or alcohol consumption or if you have any food allergies. The information can be shared manually or the various social media platforms.
This helps the application in selecting the appropriate meal and calorie intake for the concerned user. Moreover, the app developer can also collect the useful data through social media and send personalized messages and notifications.
Offering the Diet Suggestion
The key objective of the diet and nutrition app is to offer important suggestions to the users regarding the right eating habits that can boost his health and fitness level.
So, in the context of that, the app developer needs to provide with a suggestion page having a spectrum of options related to diet plans to choose from. The choice must be made according to body weight and meal preferences.
Connecting with the Wearable Devices
Well, as the technology is getting smarter, even you need to be smart enough to match the pace. So, if you are connecting the app with third-party devices and wearables such as Apple Watch, Android Wear or Fitbit, etc. it will become easier for the users to track the amount of calorie burnt in a day.
It can also monitor other important health parameters such as heart rate, distance covered by walking, running or cycling etc.
Analyzing the Statistics
It would be nice to provide some daily statistics and numbers to the users so that they can actually analyze whether they are achieving the desired results or not. For example, the user can check if after following a certain diet plan his weight got reduced or not.
Make sure that it is user-friendly and easy to understand. You can represent the data or stats in the form of pie charts or even use attractive animations to implement this feature.
The Use of Apple HealthKit and Google Fit
Both Google as well as Apple allow the other applications to exchange the important data concerning the user’s activity through the APIs.
As a result, the diet app does not have to depend on the device’s embedded utilities each and every time it needs the data such as on amount of calorie burnt or steps walked.
The Apple HealthKit and Google Fit already contain the information.
Read also: How Can HealthKit and Google Fit be Used for Healthcare and Fitness App Development?
Integrating the Push Notification
Today, push notification is one of the essential features that you would find almost in all on-demand apps including the diet app. It has become one of the most important tools for engaging more customers and also to improve the app retention.
The app would send crucial messages at right time based on consumption of important food and its nutritional value. Plus, this feature also gets better through the addition of the virtual assistant.
The Option of Live Chat with Expert Dietitians
One of the additional features that you can provide in your app is offering the opportunity to directly interact with the expert dietitians and nutritionists live.
They can guide the users better as what workout regime and diet plan they need to follow and also answer their questions based on health concerns. Well, this is a feature that will put your app in a win-win situation.
In addition, it will give you further two benefits. Firstly, you don’t have to implement any separate program or software for making diet plan and secondly you can earn money by keeping a subscription amount for it.
Adding a Shopping Cart List
Well, just as you have implemented the option of live chat support for the users so that can directly interact with experts, similarly adding the shopping assistance feature will also benefit your app a lot.
Here people usually look to buy organic and natural food products and grocery items and you can offer them good deals so that they don’t need to navigate another app for this purpose. What’s more advantageous is that if you deliver the products directly at their doorsteps.
Barcode scanner
The inclusion of the barcode scanner feature is yet another exiting feature that you can look to integrate with the diet app. The users can scan the barcodes of the items and get the description about how nourishing it is.
Attractive and User-Friendly UI/UX
Well, the UI or UX is generally regarded as the most pivotal parts of app development that play a decisive role in getting user attention. The design of the diet app should be simple yet sophisticated.
It is a nice option to add a simple Help or “?” Button. It will help them to understand the functionality of the app better and they can take assistance in case of any confusion.
Read also: Importance of UI/UX Design in Mobile App Development
Addling a Blog Section
Remember you are developing a diet app, which is a category demanding for lots of useful information. So, it would highly recommended of you add a blog section into your app where you can post the latest updates and other informative topics related to food, diet, exercise and nutrition. And believe it, people would just love to read it if you add some interesting facts and stats.
Social Media Sharing
Well, the power and influence of social media needs no introduction. You can share all the important and relevant facts and information on social media which people would share with their friends and relatives. Thus, you can increase your user base of the app.
The User Feedback Section
This segment should be clearly dedicated to the users and their valuable feedbacks. The users are the real judges who would decide whether the app has an incredible user experience or not, if it is offering smooth functioning etc. Based on the feedback you can decide what needs to be improved.
The Development Team
The development team more or less remains the same in every app development project; it’s only the number of members increase or decrease according to project needs.
Here too, you would have a project manager, a couple of designers, two or more app developers and app testers.
The Cost of Developing a Diet and Nutrition App
It is always a hard task to actually evaluate the actual cost of any app as it the costing depends on a number of factors. You know very well that most the app development companies charge on per hour basis and each of the segments takes different time for getting fully developed. Plus, the price of an app will also depend on the geographical location of the app development agency.
For instance, the app development cost is highest in US, where it’s around $50 to $250 per hour. On the other hand, the Indian markets are most reasonable where the charges range $20 to $80 only.
Conclusion
The diet and nutrition based apps are slowly and steadily gaining the momentum as more and more people are becoming health and fitness conscious.
People want to remain on a good balanced diet that keeps their weight under control and also checks the other vital parameters of the body. The diet apps are doing just that, encouraging people to eat fresh, nutritious and healthy diet.
