Top 10 Features for a SportsTech Fitness App

The global sportstech market is expected to reach 41.8 billion USD by 2027. It encompasses a broad range of sports-related technology solutions, including fitness apps, live streaming platforms, social apps for fans of particular teams or athletes, informational resources, or betting apps. 

Today we will focus on fitness software development, which is, by far, the most promising direction in sportstech. This market has been boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic and keeps growing under the influence of ongoing health awareness trends. In particular, the global market of fitness apps grows at an impressive annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2028) of 9.99%, leading to a projected market volume of US$10.04bn by 2028.

The development of a sportstech fitness app might be a very promising idea. The key point is to provide users with the value they require. In this article, we will discuss the most useful features to include in a quality sportstech application. 

There are vast numbers of features that can be included in a fitness app, depending on its purpose and target audience. Here we include the most interesting functionality that can bring your app additional selling points. These features will help you:

• Create a community of sports enthusiasts
• Ensure solid app marketing
• Provide an excellent user experience
• Promote health awareness by engaging users in diverse sports activities
• Build a product oriented on different user categories 
• Create a fitness system with outreach across various devices. 

Managing a sports club comes with numerous challenges, primarily due to the multitude of administrative tasks involved. This becomes especially relevant when a club serves a large customer base, provides various membership options, and has a complex system of scheduling for classes. Managing all these tasks just takes too much time, and a quality automation solution is necessary in such cases. 

That’s when sports club management apps come in handy. Such a platform can automate all the major administrative tasks like scheduling, membership management, training payments, reminders and notifications, and cross-club session broadcasting. In addition, an analytical dashboard will help sports club managers analyze statistics on membership, profitability, and other key metrics pertaining to their business.  

The Leobit team has implemented club management functionality in a cycling club CRM. The solution allows users to independently book a bike in the sports club without requiring assistance from an administrator at the reception. The application boasts a Progressive Web App (PWA) architecture, allowing users to book classes anonymously and access their existing accounts through web browsers, smartphones, and tablets in sports clubs. 

Repetitive fitness activities decrease user motivation for using the app. To keep the users engaged, you should provide them with a sense of achievement. There is no better way to keep people motivated than by allowing them to set individual goals and achieve them. Whether it goes about running a particular number of kilometers per day or working out for a particular number of hours, this principle helps you keep the users engaged by tracking their progress.

The core pillars of functionality for setting daily goals are features for:

• Selecting a daily task
• Setting the goal value
• Deciding a specific deadline or data for the task completion
• Recording training results to see whether the goal has been achieved

A useful feature is also creating special algorithms that track user progress and dynamically adjust the goals based on the user’s level and achievements.

Leobit has implemented such functionality in LeoStep, a gamified fitness app. We introduced a system of daily goals that adapts to each user’s proficiency level. The app awards users with badges for achieving specific milestones, such as reaching a certain number of steps per day. User goals are automatically adjusted based on their level and achievements. 

One more important factor boosting the motivation of users of a fitness app is gamification. For example, an app can work as a mobile game where users can collect objects to accomplish goals. A very popular gamification strategy is creating competition between the users by providing them with daily challenges. 

A perfect example of an app that relies on gamification features is LeoStep. The app offers the option of creating teams or joining existing ones. This allows users to embark on virtual adventures with chosen colleagues. The teams compete with each other to unlock new abilities, such as the option of recruiting more and more team members. As a result, there appears healthy competition that motivates teams to work together to achieve higher milestones.

A perfect way to grow the community of your sportstech fitness app is adding a social component. First, you can enhance team competition by introducing a team-based rivalry, as has been mentioned before. An essential feature of any fitness app is integration with social media, such as Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, or Strava. The users can connect to each other in social media groups and share their results there. In addition, you can recreate some social media features, such as the opportunity to connect with friends, share workout results, see and react to the results of others, create groups, and communicate with each other within your sportstech fitness app. 

All these social components facilitate the creation of a community of sports enthusiasts with their personal profiles. This, in turn, increases the number of app users and facilitates the app’s promotion. 

The use of various devices, both wearable and non-wearable, creates great opportunities for recording training. For example, an integration with a mobile device and its Google Maps app is an essential feature for running and cycling applications as it allows users to record their routes, pace, altitude, and other valuable parameters. Typically, apart from smartphones, fitness apps integrate with:

• Smartwatches
• Smart TVs
• Gadgets like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Experience in working with corresponding APIs is required to ensure such integrations. Some businesses go even further and provide their custom wearable devices for fitness applications. However, in this case, you will need engineers skilled in embedded development. 

Also, mind to ensure multi-device synchronization for your fitness app. This will allow the users to access their profiles from multiple devices and get synchronized data across all these platforms. 

To track their progress, users should record workouts. It is also essential for gamification, team competition, and tracking of daily goals. The way the app records training depends on its type. If we are talking about a running or cycling app, such a solution will use Google Maps or a similar integration to track and record the routes. Meanwhile, when it comes to a home workout application, such software may require integration with a device camera. The users will record their workouts and watch them later, share with friends, and coaches. Training notes would also be a useful addition to such a sports app as they can help users save tips, training results, and ideas. 

When it comes to notable examples of fitness apps with advanced functionality for recording workouts, we can mention LeoStep one more time. The app leverages advanced workout recording functionality to track and document physical activities. Once a user starts jogging or cycling, they can launch a recording to make an app capture valuable metrics such as distance covered, duration, and other relevant data. The app provides a visual representation of the workouts through integration with Google Maps. 

A dashboard with analytics and statistics on workout duration and results will be a useful addition to this feature. This will help users track their workout dynamics, recognize areas for improvement, and stay on top of their sports-related results.  

Often it is crucial to guide the users through training and the flow of a fitness app. Training materials may be an excellent addition to a fitness app as they significantly improve user experience. In particular, you can introduce a depository of audio/video guides that will facilitate the users’ workout. 

There is also an option of adding images or basic training programs to an app. If you introduce various app subscription models or just an option for in-app purchases, some exclusive training materials can be provided on a paid basis. 

Remember that your app users may not always have access to the Internet. This is relevant to cycling or running apps, especially if they are oriented on off-road routes. To make sure that the app still helps users build routes and record training, incorporate an offline mode. Its core pillar is offline access to GPS which should keep tracking the user’s location. 

The offline mode is useful to any sportstech fitness app because users can apply it to have a workout anyplace and anytime. This helps you improve user experience, boosting your solution’s popularity. 

Recovery is essential for everyone who works out. If your app guides a user through the recovery process, this feature can become a valuable selling point. Include recovery tips in your app to provide users with additional help. There is also an option of adding features for tracking the hours of sleep and recovery through the integration with wearable devices, mostly relying on heart rate and movement. This ensures a more comprehensive approach to training. Also, by aligning recovery tips with recovery tracking you can provide a more useful and personalized experience to your users.  

Any sportstech fitness app can be turned into a marketplace providing sports enthusiasts with a list of instructors and coaches offering their services. By using e-commerce templates and principles, you can provide app users with personalized instructor offers. Some aspects of this functionality include:

• Marketplace-type listing with interactive search functionality
• Multi-role logic allowing users to create both instructor and trainee accounts
• Instructor profiles with an option of adding instructor certifications, client reviews, and other information that instructors and coaches can use to introduce themselves
• Functionality for communication between sports enthusiasts and instructors, such as an in-app messenger
• Targeting scripts providing users with personalized training offers
• Live streaming features that allow the instructors to train users remotely.

This functionality unlocks great marketing opportunities and allows you to monetize the app by requesting payments from instructors who use the app to offer their services. In this case, in-app training purchases will also be useful. This means that you should integrate the solution with a payment system, such as Stripe. 

A great example of an app that connects sports enthusiasts with coaches and instructors is a web, mobile, and embedded cycling solution developed by our team. It offers live streaming for remote classes as basic functionality. With this feature, instructors can offer and conduct their classes remotely, while users can access and participate in these classes from the sports clubs. Relying on the capabilities of content delivery networks (CDNs) this feature guarantees top-notch performance and minimal delay, providing a satisfying user experience. 

Typically, to build a full-fledged sportstech fitness app, you should pick a few of the features mentioned above and integrate all the components of your digital infrastructure properly to work as a single multi-functional system. While this can be not an easy task, the right software development partner with solid experience in custom sportstech software development will help you handle everything. 

Leobit is exactly such a team as we are an experienced software development company with a rich portfolio of sportstech fitness apps. In particular, we have developed LeoStep, a gamified fitness app for our employees that has already gained recognition by winning the Netty Award and being shortlisted by SportsTech Awards, the “Oscar” in sportstech software development, as one of the best fitness apps of 2023. In addition, we have other great sportstech projects in our portfolio. 

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner in Digital & App Innovation and Top .NET Developers in Ukraine and Eastern Europe according to Clutch, we take a rigorous approach to delivering excellent sportstech applications. We focus on keeping the time to market short and adhering to all your business and user requirements.  

The market of sportstech fitness apps is thriving as the demand for in-house fitness apps, sports club management solutions, and gamified software for jogging or cycling is constantly growing. To leverage its potential, you should provide users with interesting experience and functionality they need. Among the most attractive sportstech fitness app features, we can enumerate sports club management functionality, goal-setting algorithms, gamification, social component, integration with wearable and non-wearable devices, advanced workout recording, audio and video tutorials, offline mode, sleep and recovery tracking, and listing of sports instructors. 

All these features can be implemented with a team that possesses strong expertise in custom sportstech software development. Leobit, a company with a portfolio that includes an award-winning sportstech solution and a range of successful fitness app development projects, is exactly such a team. Contact us to leverage the potential of custom fitness software development.