How to Build a Diet and Nutrition App

A diet and nutrition app can be a profitable business idea in the world that smartphone users, physical illness people are increasing. Also, it can be a risky business, especially when many tech giants are developing this field. In this article, we will show you how to build a competitive diet and nutrition app, so please read carefully if you plan to build a diet and nutrition application on your own or even by outsourcing to a software development team.

What Is a Diet and Nutrition App?

An app that helps people to live healthily and get stronger by different methods such as calorie counting and meal planning. This app develops along with technology and a busy era when people don’t have enough time to care about their health and get obese easily.

How to Develop a Diet and Nutrition App

Customer Research

Customer research is the first step to do. Food and nutrition tracking apps are popular and competitive. To survive, you need to look at the market environment under different angles. Some research from Statista showed that the obesity rate was growing. There are a lot of people who want to improve their health and change food habits so you can design a worth-using diet and nutrition plan for them, not just tracking their body.

Users of mobile apps are generally young and use meal planning tools regularly. Most of their common goals are physical activity tracking, eating habit tracking exercise and weight loss.

Diet and Nutrition Apps

Before coming up with an idea, you need to define your app. Generally, there are 4 types of diet and nutrition apps:

Nutrition: apps help people to control their eating habits by tracking calories and providing tips for food nutritional value. For example, Noom Coach. A nutrition app’s content may include calendar, meal data, photos, calorie counter, and diet tips.

Weight loss diaries: apps help users to lose weight healthily by recording meals and water intake, monitoring burned and consumed calories, selecting a suitable fitness program and controlling its implementation. FoodDiary for example. You can add a dashboard, diet plan or user’s goal and diet suggestions when developing this app.

Calorie counting and detox: apps help people to control their diet for purpose. For example, Fatsecret. A basic app shows a calorie counter, diet suggesting and barcode scanner.

Healthy food recipes: apps help people make simple, tasty and healthy dishes like PEP. To build this app, you must add the recipes’ database, ratings, “add recipes” button, recipe calorie calculator and recipe search form.

On the other hand, there are some ideas for comprehensive apps that combine two or more of the above types, such as MyFitnessPal.

Features That Diet and Nutrition Apps Must Have

Registration

When people download diet and nutrition apps, your registration function must be ready to store user’s information relating to health. This information may include age, weight, height, food allergies, goals, preferred diet, etc. Besides that, your app must be signed-up via social network (Facebook, Twitter) or email.

Dashboard and Food Logging

This is the first thing people see after signing up for your app. They can find all the information such as calorie intake, progress or nutrition tips. This feature should be invested in a lot of time and money, especially in UI/UX and customization because it will affect the success of your app.

Fitness Tracker Integration

It’s necessary to integrate that function in a health app development. Fitness trackers help users record their health conditions such as blood pressure, heart race.

Push Notifications

Push notification is a well-known function of a mobile app to catch the customer’s attention. However, you must be careful to add because it may annoy users. The best way is to build notification as a reminder for their daily workouts or healthy meal.

Diet Plan and User’s Goals

Diet and nutrition apps are born to guide people towards a healthy diet and help them to achieve goals. You collect users’ health information so you must suggest them with related health plan accordingly.

Barcode Scanner

If your app assists users in shopping, the barcode scanner is a must. Also, your app should provide data such as calories and ingredients of products.

Help

In cases your users are confused about your app, help features such as FAQs or tutorial video or chat services will support them.

Feedback

Feedback from customers will help you to improve your app. There are various methods to get feedback from users including rating and survey questions.

Social Sharing Button

Your app should connect to social channels for people to share their diet journey, success, experiences with their friends.

How Your App Makes Money

The easiest way to make your app earn money is to let users download your app free but add some paid features. Another way is to incorporate advertisement but you should consider if ads may annoy your users, the best way is to add health-and-diet-related advertisements.

In conclusion, the above tips can help you to develop a high-qualified app to attract users. However, to maintain the number of users and gain customer loyalty, it is necessary to update the change of users’ habits and tastes frequently to improve your app.