Yoga App Development Guide: Benefits, Features and Costs

It’s fair to say that yoga is a hugely popular trend these days, especially with data showing that at least 15% of adults in the USA do it. This makes yoga app development a very lucrative direction, opening up a wide market. However, to find success and build a popular solution in this niche, you need expertise and skill.

This guide is a full dive into the creation of mobile apps for yoga practitioners, covering their types, benefits, and essential features. We’ll take you through the development of a yoga app and explain how to ace it on the first try. Dive into JetBase’s robust experience to learn just what guarantees a hit app and how to raise your product’s quality.

By the end, you will hopefully feel ready to tackle the market with an app of your own. And if you need a skilled team to help with that, you’ll know exactly who to turn to. For now, though, let’s talk about yoga app development.

Global Insights into the Yoga Mobile App Market

According to current research, the meditation and yoga app market is around $1.5 billion, with major growth projected for this decade. While this isn’t as huge as the $9.25 billion fitness app market, yoga apps are their own unique niche with respective value. From the same data, we can also see that free apps have an edge in the market, though that may change.

There are plenty of opportunities to monetize a yoga app, which we’ll discuss later, but it’s not hard to see why so many choose to go for the “free” model. Gaining a user base in a market as competitive as this can be harder, so going free gives new apps some leeway.

Research also shows something insightful about the popularity of health and fitness apps by region. Though the US does come out on top by the number of users, in terms of downloads per internet user Portugal leads the list, followed by France and Belgium. This hints that wellness is an international trend, and when you go for yoga app development, you shouldn’t prioritize just one specific region for marketing.

International appeal can be vital for a new yoga app, so when you do your pre-development research, make sure to focus on more than your local region. Finding success overseas is a real possibility nowadays, as the market is poised to grow.

Different Types of Yoga Apps in the Market

Though we sometimes talk about yoga app development as if it’s a monolithic process with one end result, that is obviously not the case. There is a good variety of app types out there, each with its own usage and target audience. In order to better understand what yoga app you want to make, it’s important to know what your options are. So, let’s go down the list.

Yoga Studio-Specific Apps

This type of yoga app is designed for a specific studio, built around its branding and services. Understandably, it’s a bit different from the rest because, even if you’re working with a chain, the target audience for these is intentionally limited. They’re centered around helping the customers of a studio sign up for sessions, manage their preferences, or simply pay for the services.

It’s also possible that a yoga app of this kind will be useful to studio workers, where they will register classes, log hours of work, and share content related to yoga and their studio. It’s all up to the developers and the client to decide exactly what the functionality will be, of course.

Yoga and Fitness Combination Apps

For those seeking to build their muscles along with their mindfulness, a combo yoga app will do the trick. These combine the yoga asanas with high-intensity physical training such as push-ups and crunches. This has the potential to expand the user base, catering to both those interested in yoga and those seeking to improve their physique.

Meditation-Focused Yoga Apps

For this type of yoga app development, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies could be key. These apps center around meditation and mindfulness, helping users get in the right headspace and immerse themselves in this yoga practice. Doing so is easier with an app that plays quiet music, shows calming visuals, or simply gives practical tips.

Beginner-Friendly Yoga Apps

Everyone has to start somewhere, and a newbie-friendly yoga app can help you capture a whole slice of the market. These apps must include a lot of information that will gently guide a curious person through the world of yoga.

Yoga Aggregator Apps

We’ll end on the polar opposite of a studio-specific yoga app - an aggregator app, which is more like a general yoga portal. These help collect yoga trainers and practitioners in the same spot, working as a sort of marketplace where yoga classes are bought and sold.

It’s important for these to have good filtering and verification mechanisms. The former helps students find exactly the type of yoga they’re looking for - Ashtanga or Jivamukti, for example. As for verification, you must implement it during yoga app development to prevent fraud during transactions.

How Yoga Mobile Apps Work

Though we talked about the fact that the yoga app niche has a lot of variety, the basic inner workings of different types can be quite similar. First, the user signs up in the app, creating their unique account. If it’s a yoga student’s account, it’s a good idea to offer some customization to make the app more inviting.

Then, provide a dashboard with access to all the necessary features: search, messaging to connect with teachers, scheduling, payment setup, and more. The goal is to make navigation easy while still offering enough functionality to easily satisfy the users’ needs.

Other aspects of the apps’ work depend on their type. For example, if you’re offering streamed classes, it’s important to provide a way to play them back or archive them. If you make an aggregator yoga app, make sure to provide plenty of ways to filter out irrelevant results. Basically, the way to ensure your app works well is to consider the users’ perspective.

We’ll talk a bit more about the essential features below. Suffice it to say there is a lot to learn by simply researching your competitors and the current state of the market. Understanding what makes an app work and achieve success is a matter of listening to your target audience.

Popular Yoga Mobile Apps Overview

In order to better understand what the market for yoga apps is like, let’s talk a bit about who’s ruling it. Here are a couple of current juggernauts.

Asana Rebel

One of the biggest yoga applications out there, Asana Rebel, boasts 25 million users and a thriving community. This may be thanks to how flexible their subscription model is with monthly, tri-monthly, and annual subscriptions. For those who feel a bit more committed, there’s a lifetime option as well. It offers different sets of workouts to help users get in shape through yoga.

Thanks to extreme flexibility in workout selections and guided meditations, Asana Rebel caters to a very broad user base. These features helped it rise to prominence and become a top player in the market.

Down Dog

This yoga app with 5+mln downloads on Google Play alone, named after a yoga position, is all about doing yoga the way the user wants it. It offers Yin, Hatha, and Vinyasa - three wholly different yoga types with varied audiences. As a result, users can do yoga for fitness, recovery from injuries, or mindfulness. The subscriptions are also quite flexible, with a simple Pro option and an All Access subscription.

DownDog also supports customizable playlists for people who want to do their sessions while listening to music. It also features a selection of instructor voices that guide users and support them in their yoga efforts.

Essential Features of a Successful Yoga App

If you want to match the popularity of the apps we described above, you’ll want to have all the essentials ready for your users. Here’s what’s crucial for a yoga app.

User Registration and Onboarding

Set up a simple flow for a user to start their journey with your app. A straightforward introduction serves as a good first impression and guarantees the user feels welcome.

Time to implement: 24 hours

Yoga Session Library

Offering an archive of yoga lessons in your yoga app helps the users with their initial app interactions and first foray into yoga. It also becomes useful when they want to return to a specific session and retry certain poses.

Time to implement: 24 hours

Push Notifications and Reminders

An easy way to reignite a user’s interest in yoga or just remind them a live class is starting soon.

Time to implement: 16 hours

User Profiles and Progress Tracking

Having a place to track and show off one’s progress on their yoga journey, complete with a customizable user profile, makes the app feel more personal and inviting.

Time to implement: 32 hours

In-App Events and Challenges

Encourage users to do more yoga and compete with friends by setting weekly or monthly challenges and assigning goals they have to beat.

Time to implement: 32 hours

E-Commerce Integration for Yoga Gear

Doubling as a way to monetize your yoga app, integrations for specific products with affiliate links generate value for you and the users. They’ll be able to easily gear up for sessions with your help.

Time to implement: 24 hours

Additional Features to Enhance the Yoga App Experience

Once you have the essentials, there are a few more things you can consider if you want to improve your app’s quality.

Gamification

Turning the user’s journey through the world of yoga into a fun game with achievements, friendly competition, and progress marks helps keep them interested. Consider implementing leaderboards for hours spent on yoga or trophies for the most consistent yoga students.

Time to implement: 32 hours

Community Forums

For another social aspect, consider adding forums where users can discuss yoga and experts can give tips to newbies. This will help nurture an environment where yoga students can grow and improve.

Time to implement: 40 hours

Personalized Recommendations

Tailoring the content a user sees to their personal preferences can make them more likely to interact with the app for longer periods. Plus, they get more value out of the interaction and will thus be more likely to rate the app highly.

Time to implement: 40 hours

Social Sharing and Collaboration Tools

Lastly, letting users talk about their achievements on social media and integrating the ability to host classes together is a great social element for a yoga app. It incentivizes word of mouth and helps users feel included.

Time to implement: 32 hours

Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Yoga Mobile App

Now that we’ve talked about all the essential features, let’s talk about how to implement them. Or, rather, let’s discuss how to develop your yoga app.

Step 1: Conduct Market Research

The best way to begin is by learning what the market is missing and how your app can fill that gap. Assess the technological trends that you can hop on before they fully take off, and estimate what your app should look like at the end.

Step 2: Plan Features and Monetization Strategy

Once you have a good idea of what you want to do, it’s time to figure out how to do it. Lay out your desired functionality and estimate how long it will take to implement, as well as the cost. Plus, figure out how you want to monetize your yoga app to get the maximum revenue.

Step 3: Design UI/UX for Maximum Engagement

Polishing your app design will not only make it more inviting but guarantee that users have a better experience, making it easier to draw a big user base. Make sure to do some A/B testing to find the best approach and ensure your app’s design is perfect.

Step 4: Develop and Test the App

Then comes the actual development process, as your team creates the app and implements the functionality you choose. Remember to give special attention to testing, as bugs can really spoil the first impression and disrupt your app’s rise to prominence.

Step 5: Launch and Promote the App

Once the development is done, launch the app with a marketing campaign to get eyes on it. It may be a good idea to partner up with some yoga studios or influencers to promote your yoga app.

Step 6: Post-launch Support and Updates

After the launch, you will still have some work to do, releasing bug fixes and new features, improving your app. This guarantees your app some longevity, as well as renewed interest if you happen to add a particularly popular feature.

Top Monetization Models for Yoga Apps

We described how to create a yoga app. But how to make it profitable? In reality, of course, you set your monetization model early on after careful consideration. In order to help you understand which model would work best for your app, let’s look at the available options.

Freemium Model

First up is the simple model where your yoga app features some free content to provide everyone with a reason to use it. However, specific functionality can be gated off with a payment structure for premium users. For example, the ability to rewatch classes the user has taken or request specific positions to train their core.

In-app Purchases for Premium Yoga Classes

Another way to recoup your yoga app development cost is to set up paywalled content, specifically classes, that users pay to access. These can include classes with celebrity instructors, advanced yoga workouts, or, on the contrary, classes for total beginners. This way, users get value for their money while you establish a way to generate revenue from standard yoga app content.

Subscription Model for Unlimited Access

A logical continuation of the previous options, a subscription model is a way to generate revenue every month, with users paying regularly to unlock full access to the app. Justifying this model to the user can be a bit more difficult and requires a constant stream of new content and features. It works best for an already-established yoga app that can provide enough value to sustain subscriptions.

Revenue Sharing with Yoga Studios and Teachers

This model incentivizes partnering up with a selection of professional studios, which can use your yoga app to attract new students and then share the revenue from that class. Alternatively, if you build an aggregate app, it’s possible to take commissions on payments made through your platform. It’s best to take a small percentage from teachers who get new business via the app, not the students themselves.

Advertisements

Lastly, the classic model for monetization is advertisements in the app. This can come in the form of general promotions for specific yoga studios or goods or just in-app ads. It’s important to keep the balance and ensure your yoga app isn’t riddled with them, though. Just a banner or two would be okay, but excessive pop-ups could disrupt the user experience.

Tech Stack for Yoga App Development

Picking the optimal technologies for an app can be a delicate balancing act. Do you go for the options that encourage scalability and efficient resource use? Or is it best to optimize for speed and performance? Well, when it comes to yoga app development, we generally recommend choosing a lightweight stack with PostgreSQL or MySQL for the database.

Your backend should be handled by Node.js or React, while your frontend is going to be best with something like Vue.js. AWS for cloud storage is another standard pick, with Twilio and Cloudflare rounding out the technologies required for usability.

What’s important is adjusting your stack according to what’s best for the yoga app. If you think your user base will be more comfortable using Stripe for payment processing rather than PayPal, go with the former. Alternatively, if your budget allows it, look for the third option, which sometimes means combining a few different choices into one.

To sum up, here’s what we would suggest for a generic yoga app with an emphasis on performance:

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Yoga App?

While this question doesn’t have one answer that would cover all possible permutations of a yoga application, we can explore it with some depth to give an approximate estimate. For one, it’s important to assess what features your app will have and who will be on your dev team. If you’re just building a simple, no-frills mobile yoga app, we’d assess the cost at $30000.

That includes the design and development of core features that we’ve described above. If, however, you want to go beyond that with AI-powered or VR-inclusive features, things change. The cost of your yoga app would likely rise to around $50000, but note that it would also bump up the potential for monetization, as these features tend to attract user attention.

We’d generally advise to calculate the cost of yoga app development by estimating how many hours of work it will require and what your team’s rates will be. For example, here’s a table with an approximate breakdown:

As you can see, certain aspects always take longer due to their complexity, meaning you can include their cost in the estimates with certainty. Once you have that, add other development steps relevant to you - creating versions for new platforms, adding new technologies, etc. If you’d like us to help assess your yoga app cost with JetBase’s expertise - just let us know.

Common Challenges in Yoga App Development

There’s no process in the world that doesn’t run into trouble from time to time, and creating yoga applications is no exception. In this section, we’d like to discuss the typical problems that developers face and ways to navigate them. After all, a small roadblock shouldn’t impede your yoga app development, especially when you have JetBase on your side.

Streaming and Video Hosting Solutions

Remote yoga lessons are gaining in popularity, and for good reason - they make the practice more accessible and easy to pick up. However, they might cause a headache for first-time developers, as video processing and hosting may become an issue.

Finding the right compression algorithm and the optimal approach to data transmission is key. If you’re developing the yoga app in-house, consider outsourcing this specific part or consulting experts. Otherwise, you risk encountering quality problems and excessive buffering.

CDN Integration for Fast Access

Ensure that your CDN is configured properly, as otherwise, you risk disrupting your content pipeline. In grave cases, it can even crash the connection entirely, leaving users unable to reach their required content. Pay close attention to the work your team does with the CDN during yoga app development and double-check the resulting config to confirm it’s set up correctly.

Localization for Global Reach

Adapting to different regional interests in yoga, as well as translating all custom content to a variety of languages, can be tough. Thankfully, the former is just a matter of doing your due diligence on research and choosing your target audience well. As for the latter, AI models can help easily translate your app’s content, though some proofreading will still be a good idea.

Create Your Own Yoga App with JetBase

We hope this guide to yoga app development has given you a deeper understanding and appreciation of this niche. You’ve learned all about the different app types, their essential features, and the steps that go into creating a successful yoga application. However, even with all of this, you might still want to ensure your product beats the rest and comes to rule the market.

If you want to guarantee success, it’s crucial that you work with a team that has real experience, a team like JetBase. We’ve worked with immersive apps before, using the latest technologies to deliver a unique, valuable product to the end user. We’re also no strangers to working with spiritual apps, where design and knowledge bases play a key role.

Perhaps you’re also looking to implement video streaming in your yoga app to enable remote lessons. Our award-winning work with this functionality and experience with video processing guarantee we have the expertise to ensure that your yoga students won’t suffer from buffering or low-quality video.

For more than a decade, JetBase has been crafting custom solutions that surprise users and give them a reason to stick around. If you want a product that boasts great longevity, a forward-thinking design, and killer features, you’ve come to the right place. Simply send us a message and we can schedule a consultation about your yoga app development.