Yoga App Development: Specifications, Features, Cost

It’s been proven by multiple studies that yoga is beneficial for your physical and mental health. Of course, the Health & Wellness eCommerce industry has seized the opportunity to monetize the benefit while offering people handy applications with guided yoga sessions, meditations, and so on.

If you want to create a yoga app of your own, it’s not too late. But you need some knowledge of the industry and professional developers with experience in the niche and the necessary tech stack.

There are so many questions that need answers. What features to add? How to monetize? How much does it cost? Where to find the right developers? We have the answers and created this guide to help you get started!

Key takeaways:

• Mobile app developers for hire for yoga instructors and practitioners is popular around the globe, with an estimated market value for 2025 of over $215 billion worldwide and over 34.4 million people practicing only in the US.
• The most popular yoga apps include Down Dog with over 5M+ downloads on Google Play, Asana Rebel (also 5M+ and Editor’s Choice on Google Play), and Gaia (with 1M+ downloads) among others.
• The top features to consider when making a yoga app include social login, progress-tracking, eStore, and recommendations.
• When you make a yoga app, the development stages include MVP building, main app development, and testing. However, beforehand, you must perform market and competitor research and find the right partners that know how to start such an app for yoga.
• The tech stack for any yoga app to be made include Facebook Mobile and Firebase SDKs, as well as PayPal and other systems for financial operations.
• You can monetize the app through in-app purchases, paid ads, and subscription plans.

The Yoga Apps Across the Globe: the Target Audience and Tendencies

Before building an application for yoga practitioners, you have to know who to target the final product for. It’s estimated that about 300 million people around the globe practice yoga. As far as we know, the largest demographic includes:

• Mostly millennials, 30 to 49 years old, however, the popularity among youth also grows.
• Mostly women, while the male group takes up 28%, which should also be considered

Because of COVID-19, many physical studios have closed, which opened the way for the app industry to pour its resources into the gap. 

Also, with the increase in stress and anxiety since 2019, a lot of people decided to turn to mindfulness, meditation, and yoga to relieve tension. A lot of businesses, on the other hand, started learning about how to build a healthcare app to address the demand. With the new world crisis of 2022, the tendency only increased.

To get a deeper understanding of designing app for yoga, let’s review some of the most popular programs the modern market can offer.

The Most Popular Yoga Mobile Apps

Statista offers a rating of the most downloaded yoga and mindfulness applications. This may be useful for you if you want to create an app for yoga and add some meditative or other mindfulness practices.

Healthline has also compiled a great list of the most popular apps for yogis. The list is for the year 2020, but little has changed in terms of the participants of the compilation. So, here are the leaders of the market you can research to understand what’s in demand among your target audience:

• Down Dog – 7 voices of yoga instructors, 30K settings, and new workouts every day.
• Daily Yoga – 50 workout plans and detailed guidance for each asana, including the most difficult ones like a shoulder stand.
• Asana Rebel – yoga as a fitness approach, improving strength and mobility. Yoga-based workouts for those who aren’t into traditional sessions.
• Glo – various practices to fit your busy schedule. Choose a short stretch during lunch break or a full 60-minute session before bed.
• Gaia – a library for those interested in yoga and meditation. Along with practices, the app includes background info on the philosophies that help users understand the deep meaning of mindfulness.

All of these are free with in-app purchases to enhance the experience. This is a perfect model that can help you establish the brand and already monetize it. 

Based on these apps, we’ve created a list of features and functions you may want to include in your plan before you build your own yoga app to be competitive.

Functions and Features of Yoga Apps

When thinking about how to create a fitness app, you have to understand that people aren’t looking for apps anymore; they look for experiences and mentoring. 

So, here’s what to add:

Sign up

Allow users to create a profile to track their progress, save favorite sessions, and get personalized notifications.

Social login

Always add a couple of social login buttons. Diversify the list of login opportunities by adding Google and Apple ID, as well as Facebook.

Explore and Search

Consumers will try to get familiar with the yoga instructor app you’ve developed. Make it easier for them by having an Explore tab with the most popular workouts and those for their chosen level and goals. Also, the Search feature with some filters won’t hurt.

Gamification

Progress trackers, goals, daily tips on yoga, mindfulness, and nutrition, and quizzes – all this increase engagement. Gamification in learning apps proved to be a great solution, so why not try it in your fitness app?

Recommendations

Based on the information the user provides in their profile (level, preferred yoga type, preferred sessions a week, goal, etc.), offer personalized recommendations.

eStore

An in-app store is valuable when you want to monetize your application. Add special guided meditations, professional yoga sessions, and other digital assets along with physical goods like yoga mats, attire, etc.

Coaching/mentoring

Engage well-known teachers and invite them for classes, especially for the Premium version of the software. Session streaming will increase the value of such content as it’s going to be live.

The final list of features depends on the specification of your app. Our recommendation is to consult someone with experience in the Health & Wellness niche to see what functions are essential for your project and which ones can be added later to save money on the initial launch.

So, how to build a yoga mobile app? Let’s overview the process stage by stage.

Stages of Online Yoga App Development

The following stages of yoga app design and development are essential for every product owner. We also would like to mention that ProCoders can take up your project at any stage, making the transition smooth for you and improving the quality of the end product.

Stage 1: Market and competitor research

By researching the market for mobile application development for yoga instructor, you see:

• The detailed demographics of your target audience
• The most popular features
• Top competitors to research later
• Consumers’ pain points (you’re going to address them when creating the app and marketing it), questions without answers, etc.
• Any gaps you can fill with your app

By researching the competition, you see:

• What approaches are the most effective at engaging TA (target audience)
• What strategies they use
• What keywords they target when marketing
• What colors and practices they use
• What their users say about the apps (especially the cons, i.e. what you can fix to be better than competitors), etc.

This data is essential for outlining a business idea and knowing exactly what kind of yoga app you want to make

Stage 2: Choosing an app development model

Do you want two separate apps for Google Play Market and Apple Store? Or maybe you’re looking to create only one for one platform? There’s also a possibility to build a cross-platform application.

Decide based on the market research results, i.e. on the demographics of your TA. If most of them use iOS, target that platform. You can launch a similar app for Android users later. In case the audience uses both and/or another OS, a hybrid version will work.

Also, you have to keep in mind your budget, as creating one app for one platform is cheaper than building a cross-platform version, although you may lose a part of potential buyers when choosing the cheaper route.

When in doubt, ask ProCoders analysis for help through the Discovery Phase. There, we’ll provide you with financial and timing estimates and recommend the most effective development approach.

Stage 3: Planning time and budget, and hiring specialists

Planning your budget, time to market, the number of staff members you need to hire, and how you’re going to hire them.

Gladly, ProCoders can help you with all those tasks. Our Discovery Phase allows us to calculate the time, money, and needed resources. As to the hiring model, it’s totally your call.

You may have a team already, prepared to start the development process. If this isn’t the case, you can:

• Hire a team yourself — this involves lots of searching, resume-viewing, interviewing, testing, and onboarding. It’s also more expensive than other hiring models. And to top that, you can spend a year looking for the right candidates.
• Use hiring agency services — it’s cheaper and faster, but such agencies can’t vouch for the professionalism of the people they hire for you as there are no technical managers working there, only recruiters.
• Use staff augmentation or outsourcing — an optimal variant for many reasons. First of all, it’s cheaper than hiring yourself. It’s also faster — ProCoders spend around 4-6 weeks looking for the best candidates in case all our employees are engaged in other projects or we don’t have a suitable pro for you. And finally, the technical team leaders test the candidates to see if they will fit. By the way, you can interview the final team yourself to ensure it’s the best fit.

Stage 4: MVP development

Minimum Viable Product is a version of your app you can pitch to potential sponsors to get financing and use to test the basic functions and abilities like login, choosing one a practice, clicking buttons, etc.

Based on MVP analysis results, you can make changes to the final version of the app and move on to the main development as you get support from investors.

Stage 5: App development

The development process includes front-end, backend development, and API integration. While skilled developers do their jobs, you can check in, review reports, consult on improving speed and user experience, etc.

Also, it’s time to start planning the marketing stage, where all that research of pain points and gaps you can fill will definitely come in handy.

Stage 6: Testing and deployment

App testing is another important stage where specialists can find bugs in the app that can become detrimental to your success. If you launch an application without testing it or trusting the developers with the job, you may end up losing money, time, and reputation.

After the testing, you can deploy the app, as well as your marketing strategy, and wait for the first feedback to see where you can improve it in the next version.

There’s so much work in designing a yoga application, and a lot of it is your responsibility. So, it makes sense to find a partner that can find the right developers and hire them for you. Such people need to have experience in Health & Wellness segment development and know the main tech stack for such an app.

Tech Stack You Need to Build a Yoga App

Here’s the knowledge your developers should have in order to be qualified to build a yoga app for you:

• Facebook Mobile SDKs – FB offers full support of the app by providing social sign-up and login, analytics, customer support via Messenger, and monetization.
• Stripe, PayPal, or Braintree – for fast and convenient in-app payments.
• Firebase – for push notifications.
• ReactJS – for user interface.
• Hazelcast – for caching.
• AWS – cloud platform for the app, etc.

As you know about the most popular apps, their features, how to create a yoga app, and what stack a pro should have, let’s flash forward to the best part (aside from being useful to your clients) – monetization.

Monetization of a Yoga App

People who know how to make a yoga app must have seen a bunch of such projects and may also know how to monetize them. But your thought process is the most important here since you know best for your company.

That being said, here are some ideas for you.

Paid subscription plans

A free version is very advisable, but you can also add paid plans to target people of different budgets. You can call them Basic, Pro, and Gold plans, for example. Or, leave one paid Premium plan if you don’t want to crowd the app.

In-app purchases

Premium yoga sessions, podcasts with successful yogis and meditation practitioners, paid learning materials, challenges with rewards, and your eShop will help monetize the app.

Paid ads

Relevant, non-aggressive ads won’t tamper UX and will add some steady money to your revenue. Make sure there aren’t a lot of ads, as this may distract and annoy people. You can adopt a popular approach where you show ads to everyone using the free version of the application and offer to get the Premium plan to hide ads.

The secrets to app monetization are its simplicity, speed, and timely offers. Still, not all applications succeed. Why? Because they don’t use ProCoders secret ingredients.

How ProCoders Can Be Helpful in Yoga App Development

ProCoders is a staff augmentation company that helps businesses turn their ideas into reality. We can provide you with qualified engineers for any niche with experience in that niche. 

Our Clutch profile has over 60 detailed reviews about our cooperation with some of the most loyal customers. Read them when in doubt.

Here’s why ProCoders is a top choice:

• Full technical support at every stage, even post-launch.
• A meticulous hiring process for every specialist. We interview them at least twice, conduct practical tests, and hire the best ones afterward.
• We’re flexible and will adapt to the capacity and scale you require.
• We value honest communication and long-term commitments, not quick money and lack of quality. So, you can be sure you’ll always get sincere feedback and recommendations from our specialists.
• We always look for people with adequate salary expectations and top-level skills. That is not only to make sure you get high quality for a normal price, but also because we pay these people monthly, whether they are engaged in a client’s project or not.

Feel free to contact us for more information.

Conclusion

Yoga, meditation, and mindfulness have all become very popular with the ongoing worldwide crises. The leading apps such as Down Dog and Asana Rebel are real proof of that tendency.

Your program can become the next best thing.

Yoga instructor app development itself starts with you finding the right people to do it. However, beforehand, you need to perform market and competitor research to know what to offer to your customers.

ProCoders can take up the development of the application for yoga practices at any stage. If you only have an idea, we can also help you with our Discovery Phase, where we estimate realistic time and budget according to your needs.