How To Develop a FemTech App: Key Steps and Strategies

Every day, women face several problems and challenges. Luckily, they can solve many of them nowadays more elegantly thanks to innovations. It gave birth to FemTech, software and services leveraging technology to positively impact women's health. This is why the femtech app market is positively exploding, with a $55.1 billion estimate in 2023. North America alone accounts for $17.8 billion, showing how a single region can net major financial results.

But we’re not just excited about femtech app development because it’s a good investment. It’s also a chance to help women suffering from chronic health issues. Plus, even for perfectly healthy women out there, a solution for ovulation and period tracking is pretty much the norm. So, what does it take to make an app addressing these needs?

To make the answer to that question simple, we want to take you into the world of femtech app development and explain how to do it right. Our guide will address the types of femtech apps, their essential features, and steps in developing them. We’ll give a few examples of the field’s top players to inspire you, too.

By the end of this article, you should feel confident in making your own femtech app that can take the market by storm. Thanks to JetBase’s expertise, you will know exactly how to set the course and what you can achieve. And if you decide you need some practical help, you know who to call.

What is a FemTech App? Understanding FemTech in Women’s Health

The term “femtech” is relatively new, as it only emerged in 2016, thanks to Ida Tin. Any application designed to aid uniquely female issues and problems, mostly centered around health and wellness, can be classified as femtech. We’ll talk later about the specific types of apps that fall under this umbrella. For now, let’s talk about how these apps are actually used and made.

For the ethical and professional side of things, scientists suggest that it’s essential to know how you work with user data and what your app offers. This isn’t just limited to sharing doctor-approved and verified information. Storing patient data securely and only working with vetted medical personnel on relevant features and data could be a good way to address this.

Certain papers raise the question of how much control femtech apps must give users. That means both over their data and bodies, as autonomy, identity, and privacy are hot topics right now. While we focus on the technical side of things in this article, it’s important to consider the societal aspects as well.

Overview of the FemTech Market and Growth Potential

It won’t surprise you that, since femtech apps are designed for women, many of them are also created by women. With a projected rise to $140B by 2031, it’s clear that they’ve reached their audience successfully. That’s a lot of potential to expand. Besides, it’d be wise to take advantage of it now, especially when the market is already booming but still has room for new players.

Types of FemTech Apps for Women’s Health

The field of femtech has a pretty healthy variety to offer any company that wants to try its hand at it. This section will show you the diversity of femtech app development and highlight each type’s audience and usability.

Fertility and Period Tracking

Pretty much anyone who gets periods or wants to get pregnant can use an app nowadays to simplify tracking. This includes predicting the start of a period, analyzing one’s cycle for fertile days, and estimating health data to assess the likelihood of conception. Femtech apps like these are a staple of the niche and usually the first thing people think of.

Pregnancy and Maternity

Similarly, apps for tracking one’s pregnancy and the baby’s first months of progress are another mainstay among femtech apps. These help future moms ensure that their pregnancy is going well and that they’re meeting all milestones in weight, belly size, and vitamin levels.

Women’s Health Education

Learning more about our bodies and their function can be crucial to keeping oneself healthy. Educational femtech apps provide resources for women and young girls to understand the processes in their organisms and discover what health looks like for them. This prevents cases where minor issues spiral into major consequences due to a lack of understanding.

Telehealth and Online Consultations

While this isn’t strictly limited to femtech, telemedicine apps are great for busy career women, new moms, and those who can’t visit the doctor’s office for some reason. These femtech apps provide a bridge that instantly connects medical professionals and patients. This removes a lot of expenses associated with medical work and makes healthcare more accessible.

Fitness and Wellness for Women

Keeping fit and mentally healthy is vital for everyone. Femtech apps facilitate that by offering yoga courses, workouts, guided meditations, and more. Such apps need to have wearables integration, plentiful fitness-related content, and workout courses. This will help encourage users to get in shape and improve their health considerably.

Sexual Wellness

Although physical and mental health are much more popular topics in society, sexual health is no less important for a woman. Therefore, femtech apps do need to focus on it, delivering tips on the female body, proper sexual practices, and ways to improve one’s experience with them.

Chronic Disease Management in FemTech

Many women suffer from chronic diseases, including female-specific ones, making educational and medical femtech apps centered around them necessary. These solutions should help diagnose and manage such diseases and allow patients to contact doctors easily. It can dramatically improve the quality of life for those with otherwise debilitating conditions.

Mental Health and Wellness

While we touched on this in the section for physical fitness, there is a subset of femtech apps specifically for mental health practices. They establish safe spaces for women to share their issues, get therapy, or simply practice mindfulness and unwind. In today’s hectic world, such an app can be a lifesaver for a stressed-out woman seeking peace.

Key Business Opportunities in the FemTech Industry

With this variety, your head may be spinning with ideas and potential paths forward. To structure this a bit, we’d like to highlight three specific directions in this space. These are all currently expanding, exciting niches to take with femtech app development.

Personalized FemTech Solutions

The whole point of femtech apps is to make women’s lives better. Doing so gets easier when the app caters directly to its users. Thanks to the advances in AI, this is a realistic goal to pursue, using algorithms to craft personalized workout routines and wellness tips. Plus, user data can help femtech apps analyze users’ health better and provide insights that are highly personalized.

FemTech for Underserved Communities

Femtech apps make female healthcare more readily accessible and have the potential to also reduce its cost, opening up its benefits to women from low-income communities. This includes those far from metropolitan areas, who can contact high-quality doctors through the app.

FemTech Innovations for Fertility and Reproductive Health

Fertility and associated issues are a major problem nowadays, with 1 in 6 people infertile. Femtech apps can address this with doctor consultations, knowledge bases, and precise tracking for medicine intake, vitals data, and ovulation cycles. If you focus your femtech app on fertility challenges, you might be able to help those struggling with a life-changing issue.

Top 5 Femtech Apps

In order to understand how to structure your femtech app development and which niche you could take in the market, it’s important to see which apps are succeeding. For this purpose, we’ve picked out five prominent femtech apps that show off the industry’s strengths.

Flo

This mainstay among femtech apps has been in the market for almost a decade now, offering period tracking, a thriving community, and, as of recently, AI-powered personalization. By updating its standard features, Flo has kept itself relevant in a competitive niche.

Gennev

Another “veteran” of the market, Gennev helps those in menopause with telehealth consultations, offering vast educational resources to handle this transition. It also offers a selection of goods that can help menopausal women, building an ecosystem of support.

Clue

Centered around sexual wellness and educating users about female health, Clue is a long-term success with its own subscription model. It started when attitudes toward topics like menstruation were less open and gave a valuable tool to women who seek to understand their bodies.

Coro

Unique among other femtech apps, Coro is specifically designed to pair with a device that monitors breastfeeding. It analyzes milk flow, warns about potential issues, and guarantees that the baby gets enough sustenance to grow up healthy and happy.

Grace Health

This app actually started out as an AI chatbot on Facebook before its creators saw widespread interest in its consulting services. Now, it’s one of the primary apps that educate women across Africa about menstrual and sexual health and wellness.

Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a FemTech App

Now it’s time for the breakdown of the development process, which we’ll keep rather straightforward.

Step 1 - Define the App’s Scope and Features

Assess what you want to see in your app, which platforms you’ll be targeting, and what your tech stack should be.

Step 2 - Research and Compliance for Women’s Health Apps

Study the market, as well as the legal regulations, to ensure that you know what you’re in for and can launch smoothly when the time comes.

Step 3 - Design a User-Friendly Interface

Creating an inviting and straightforward design is important for user engagement and retention. Remember to iterate and introduce changes based on the test audience feedback.

Step 4 - Develop Core Functionalities

You can’t have femtech apps without features, so this is the time to implement the basics and create an MVP version. This will serve as your proof of concept and a way to evaluate your product’s future.

Step 5 - Implement Privacy and Security Measures

It’s important to protect user data from unauthorized access, so implement encryption at rest and in transit. Plus, establish security protocols for in-app authentication, as well as the servers that host the data.

Step 6 - Launch and Continuous Improvement

Once your femtech app is ready, deploy it to the app stores and gather analytics on the usage metrics, and see what can be improved. Post-release updates are important to keep your audience engaged and get renewed attention.

Essential Features of a FemTech App

Some things during femtech app development are completely up to you, as creating new functionality will build up your app’s identity. However, there are also certain features that any good femtech app should have, at least if you want a fighting chance in a competitive market.

Period and Ovulation Tracking

This is useful both for those trying to conceive and those who aren’t, one of the foundational features in femtech solutions. Using users’ own data, create forecasts for their periods and ovulations.

Telehealth and Online Consultation Integration

Giving users the ability to contact their OB-GYN via phone makes it easier to consult on important issues. This should also include consultation archives and a live chat, for quick check-ins.

Symptom and Health Monitoring

Tracking the changes in the user’s health and predicting possible complications or illnesses is vital. It allows your app to serve a proactive purpose and potentially prevent serious issues.

Medication and Birth Control Management

Reminders to take medication and in-app prescription renewals guarantee that users will never miss a day of pills or have to go to the doctor’s office for a simple refill. Plus, doctors can keep tabs on patients that way as well.

Pregnancy and Postpartum Support

Helping mothers during a difficult time through social and medical support, with advice and consultations, is a crucial purpose of femtech apps. Build knowledge bases and a way to book therapy sessions to improve their experience.

Cycle Prediction and Alerts

Users should be able to turn on notifications for changes in their cycle and have alerts about an upcoming period or ovulation. Enabling this creates a lot of value, especially since you should be tracking that data anyway, making this feature easier to implement.

Community and Social Support

Establishing a social space where women can talk about their experiences with the app or, in general, builds a comfortable atmosphere for the users. Plus, it encourages regular app use and long-term engagement.

Integration with Wearable Devices

The point of many femtech apps is to get the user in touch with her body, and getting analytics and notifications from wearable IoT devices is the prime way to do so. Connect them through the device’s API and keep the data stream instant and steady for optimal results.

AI for Personalized Health Insights

Using AI algorithms, you can analyze users’ health and habits better, creating in-depth analytics and offering them custom workout and wellness courses.

Cost of Developing and Maintaining a FemTech App

Creating all of those features isn’t free, of course, and femtech app development will require you to build up a budget. But just how much will your femtech app cost, and how do you assess potential future expenses? JetBase is here to help you do just that.

Factors Influencing Development Costs

Many things can sway the typical costs, including a force majeure or just a change in the app’s direction. However, the typical factors that determine the price of femtech app development are simple:

• Tech stack;
• Developer rates;
• UI/UX design;
• Targeted platforms;
• Features.

This is the core that will decide how expensive or budget-friendly your app will be. To simplify your calculations, we’ll help out with some data on the typical price of such work with JetBase:

Long-term Maintenance and Updates

Aside from the cost of actual femtech app development, you’ll see extra expenses once the app is released. For one, you’ll be spending on analytics and user research, but the brunt of the cost will go to another aspect altogether. We’re talking about updating your femtech app and patching potential issues. Plus, offering maintenance to guarantee stable service to all users.

So when you’re compiling the budget for your femtech app, consider this post-deployment period. While it won’t be the biggest expense on the list, it’s a meaningful one still.

Best Practices and Challenges in FemTech App Development

Now that we’ve covered the development process and all the functionality you need to build into your app, let’s talk about some finer points. It’s crucial that you know the typical pain points of femtech app development and can avoid these pitfalls, making all the right decisions.

Privacy and Data Security

Perhaps the utmost concern for any app or business is keeping their user data and information secure. This requires encryption, as well as regular maintenance for security purposes, eliminating potential threat vectors. Plus, your femtech app development must put a special focus on authentication methods that prevent unwarranted access.

Regulatory Compliance in Health Tech

Another crucial aspect of keeping your femtech app reputable and reliable is to follow all medical and data regulations. This includes things like HIPAA, GDPR, and other regional ones. That means you may need to adjust how you store and process data, as well as offer users more control over their information.

User Engagement and Retention Strategies

As we have already mentioned, the market for femtech apps is bustling, and that’s a double-edged sword. This amount of healthy competition may make it hard for new apps to stay afloat. In order to keep users engaged and grow your audience, pay attention to market research and usage metrics, analyzing them with AI to spot valuable trends.

Create Your Own Femtech App with Jetbase

There are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of in the femtech space and we’re sure that our guide will help you do just that. Now that you know how to develop a femtech app, make it secure, and fill it with great features, all that’s left is to actually create your solution.

Doing so is, of course, easier with a professional team helping you out. Whether you just want a consultation on the technical side of things, a full project planning session, or would like to outsource development, JetBase is ready.

Our team has more than a decade of experience in the custom software market, and we’ve helped businesses create scalable, optimized apps many times. This includes healthcare software too, as we’ve built mobile apps and telehealth solutions to improve medical services.

We always put quality and client needs first, creating budget-conscious solutions that match your ambitions and deliver value to users. In order to do so, we provide comprehensive progress reports and innovative ideas using the latest technologies.

If you’d like to know more about how we work, explore our portfolio. Or, if you think you’re ready to tackle femtech app development, send us a message, and let’s schedule our first consultation.