Are you a health and fitness creator or enthusiast? Do you dream of building a brand, sharing your knowledge with people around the world, and regaining control of your time with a stable revenue stream?
If you do, launching an online fitness business is a great way to make your dream come true. And an app-based business is your path to success.
Not sure how to do that? We’ve helped dozens of fitness creators build apps that generate revenue and keep members engaged with active communities.
Let’s jump in.
2025 is a great time for fitness apps
There’s a ton of demand for fitness apps right now.
Popular fitness apps like MyFitnessPal, Strava, Lose It!, Peloton, and Nike Training Club are some of the most downloaded apps out there. Chances are you’ve used one of them yourself. You’ll find workout apps, nutrition trackers, and sleep trackers in the top 100 apps in the Apple App Store.
You might be wondering if all of these big names mean it’s too late to launch a new app. Let me assure you: it’s not. With such high demand and a huge number of ways to differentiate yourself from what’s already out there, now is a great time to launch your own fitness app.
According to SkyQuest, the fitness app market is poised to grow from $2.49 billion in 2024 to $9.6 billion by 2032. And among Uscreen customers, the fitness category has the highest number of both users and sessions. That’s a huge market that you can be part of. You just need to find the right niche to focus on.
We’ll talk about that shortly – first, let’s take a look at what will make a successful app in this competitive space.
Is an app really worth it?
You might be wondering if this huge market for fitness could be better harnessed by monetizing on Instagram.
Sure, you could. But remember that social media isn’t really under your control. Search algorithms determine your reach and engagement. You have very limited branding opportunities. And content restrictions mean you can’t just post whatever you want. Plus you can run into issues, like YouTube demonetization, that make your income significantly less stable.
A large social following is important if you want to make money in fitness online, but the most successful fitness creators aren’t using it as their primary source of revenue. That comes from memberships and apps. (You certainly can build a successful online fitness business only relying on social media, but it takes a lot of work and can be a bit risky because you don’t own your audience.)
Look at Move U, an online fitness brand that focuses on helping people solve imbalances, misalignments, and pain. They have over 1.5 million followers on Instagram:
But it’s their membership site that generates stable revenue through subscriptions and keeps people coming back with an engaged community. With fitness programs, coaching, and mobile apps, users get a lot of value from MoveU’s membership site and are motivated to keep coming back.
In short, if you’re serious about building a fitness brand that’s resistant to the constant shifts of social media and has the potential to create stable revenue for you, an app is the way to go.
What makes a successful fitness app?
1. Great service
There are many different types of services that you can provide with a fitness app. But successful apps all have something in common: they provide a great service. That’s true of nutrition trackers, health coaching apps, meditation guides, and workout programs.
There’s plenty of opportunity in the market, but it’s a crowded space. You’ll need to stand out by providing value in a better way – or a different way – than anything else out there. And if your users aren’t blown away by how well your app solves their problems, they’ll find another tool.
2. Great user experience
You might have the best workouts or the most technologically advanced nutrition tracking available – but if your app isn’t easy and intuitive to use, it will fall flat. Users expect well-designed apps that are fast and easy to use.
Spend time building a great user interface for your app – or, if you’re not interested in building one yourself, use a tool that provides one (we’ll discuss this option in more detail below). That’s something you’ll notice about our favorite examples of fitness OTT apps: they have fantastic user interfaces.
On a related note, make sure your users can access your video content while they’re on the go. As you can see from this data we’ve collected from our customers, most viewers are watching from apps – but there are still lots of people who want to watch from a web browser.
This is why choosing the right fitness streaming platform is important – you can build an audience using a fitness membership site and then launch an app when you have a community large enough to support it. That’s how some of our favorite successful fitness streaming brands have done it.
3. Great marketing
If you want a lot of downloads (and paying customers), you’ll need to get your fitness app in front of the people who want it. That means marketing. If you already have an audience – if you’ve built a successful YouTube or Instagram following, for example – this part shouldn’t be too hard.
If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to spend more time on it. You may need to build a social media following. Or partner with someone who has an audience. Going to events, networking, or working with an already established fitness studio can also work.
No matter how big your audience is at the moment, choosing an app-building tool that includes integrated marketing solutions will make your job easier.
4. Great community
Not every fitness app has a built-in community, but it’s one of the things that make the best apps stand apart from the rest.
Here’s a statistic to remember: Uscreen customers with an active community see half the member churn of customers without one. And those with mobile apps see up to 78% of their community engagement happen through their mobile apps.
Because churn is one of stable revenue’s greatest enemies, that’s a very big deal. So it’s worth investing in the community around your service and your app. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to build and grow an online fitness community once you’ve built your app.
How to create a fitness app
We’ve seen that now is a great time to launch a fitness app and a few of the things that will make your fitness app a hit. Now let’s get into the details of how to make that happen.
1. Decide what kind of fitness app you’ll build
There are many types of fitness apps. What do you want to create?
You could share your own live or recorded workouts. Or offer live coaching. Some apps help users track their nutritional intake. Others help users track and improve their sleep, mental health, or take a holistic approach to all of the above.
What do you hope to offer your users? The answer will determine your approach to the rest of the steps in the process. A nutritional app may need access to an external API and nutritional database, for example, while a Pilates app might benefit more from a way to get in touch with the instructor. Thinking about these issues early will help you lay the proper foundation for your app.
For the rest of our examples, we’ll discuss a video-based workout app that offers recorded and live workouts as well as community engagement features. But the points apply to almost every type of fitness app.
If you want more specifics on things you’ll need to think about for other types of fitness apps, you can reference these articles:
- How to Make a Diet and Nutrition App: The Ultimate Development Guide
- Mastering Sleep Tracker App Development: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Restful Solutions
- How to Build a Meditation App like Headspace and Calm
Decide where your app will be available
While you’re thinking about the type of fitness app you’d like to build, remember that there are lots of places you can make that app available. Remember that you’re not just limited to mobile apps!
Smart TV apps, for example, are popular among fitness creators because it gets your workouts right into your users’ living rooms. If you’re interested in smart TV app development, check out these guides to see what the process is like:
- How to Create Your Own Android TV App
- Building a Samsung TV App
- How to Create a Roku Channel
- How to Build an Apple TV App
- LG TV App Development
Traditional mobile apps are great, too. Many fitness creators build an iOS video streaming app because Apple products are so popular. If you choose the right platform, it’s usually very easy to develop an Android streaming app alongside it, too.
And don’t forget other mobile devices – some of our fitness creators have even used Uscreen to create Apple Watch fitness apps!
2. Focus on your niche
Targeting a small niche is an effective way to differentiate your online fitness business. “Busy professionals” is a huge category and there’s a ton of competition. If you have a strong social media following, you’ve probably already done a good job of differentiating.
For our video workout app, we might sell online fitness programs to people who want to do Pilates in their hotel room while they travel or families who work out together. These are easier niches to get established in.
When launching your app, stay focused on your niche. A group that you’ve been serving well in the past will be your best customers when you launch your mobile or smart TV app.
Fittest Core is a great example – Macy Pruett launched her fitness business to help pre- and postpartum moms work out safety and confidently. This audience wasn’t being sufficiently served, and Pruett was able to step in and launch a successful membership community by providing online fitness content that met their needs.
When you’re thinking about expanding by launching an app, don’t lose sight of what made your fitness content successful in the first place. You may be able to expand later, but staying focused while you’re launching your app will help you build an audience.
3. Create your fitness content
The type of app you’re creating will determine what “content” means for this step. In the case of our video-based workout app, it’s workout videos – they’ll need to be recorded and edited. For a nutritional app, it might be the nutritional facts that you get from an external database, in which case you’ll need to make sure that connection is working. Another fitness app might be require lots of written content.
Unless you already have a large library of content, start building your fitness content library early. You might not need as much content as you think (among our customers who offer fitness streaming sites and apps, the average is 15 hours of video), it’s good to have enough content when you launch that it’s worth it for users to pay for your app.
It’s also possible to create content on the fly. M/BODY, an online fitness studio, films 95% of its content live, then uses Uscreen to automatically upload the recorded videos that can be viewed later.
This emphasis on live classes combined with flexible monetization and a dedicated community have helped M/BODY pull in $40,000 per month.
4. Decide on a monetization model
How you plan on monetizing your app may determine how you built it and what features you want to include.
Here are several ways you can monetize your app (remember, we’re focusing here on a video-based workout app and community, but you can apply similar principles to other types of fitness apps):
- Subscription video on demand: Users pay a regular fee (usually monthly or annually) and get access to your videos. They might get access to everything or you may have tiered subscription options that give access to different sets of videos.
- Transactional video on demand: Users pay to rent or buy access to a video, a set of videos, or an entire course.
- One-time fee: Users pay once and get access to everything the app offers forever.
- Community-only access: Depending on how our video app provides value and what people want from it, it’s possible to offer access to the community as a standalone membership option.
- Hybrid approach: Combine any of the methods above. You could, for example, offer a membership that provides unlimited access but also allow users to rent a single video.
Power Nation Fitness‘s three-tiered membership options provide a great example of flexible monetization:
New members can clearly see the different levels of access in each tier and can choose the one that works best for them.
5. Determine how you’ll build your app
There are three ways you can go about developing a fitness app: you can partner with a no-code platform, build it from scratch yourself, or hire an agency. Here’s a quick breakdown of each:
Creating a fitness app with a no-code platform
Best for creators wanting to release an app quickly with minimal expense and no technical expertise.
When you partner with a platform to build a fitness app, the platform takes care of all of the technical aspects. You’ll choose your brand colors, upload logos, and make some design decisions, but the actual building of the app will be taken care of for you.
This is especially good for creators who want to build video-based apps, as there are many over-the-top (OTT) app builders that can help you get started. These apps make it easy to build a content library, live stream workouts, or offer remote coaching to your users.
It’s also a good option if you want to expand beyond iPhone and Android apps. Our workout video business could have an Apple Watch app, for example, or we could publish Roku and Samsung apps so users can get our videos on their smart TVs.
Partnering with a no-code platform is right in the middle when it comes to cost, and you can plan on spending a couple hundred dollars a month, depending on the platform you choose and which features you’re looking for.
Code up a fitness app from scratch
Best for creators with extensive technical expertise who want full control over their fitness app.
If you have experience building apps, you may be tempted to build one yourself. While this isn’t the best option for most creators, many will appreciate the fact that they have complete control over every aspect of their app.
This may also be an appealing option if you’re building an app that needs complex integrations (a sleep tracker, for example, may need to access a phone’s accelerometer and microphone to analyze sleep patterns).
One big advantage of coding up an app yourself is that it’s completely free. You’ll pay to use APIs or host content, but the app itself won’t cost you a dime. That being said, it’ll take some time to build it and you’ll need to be familiar with the programming languages used by the platforms you’re interested in.
Hire a developer for your fitness app
Best for creators with very complex ideas or large budgets.
Does your fitness app idea include some very complex functionality? Do you have tens of thousands of dollars to invest in your idea? If you answered yes to either of these questions, working with a developer or an agency might be the right option.
Hiring an experienced developer gives you access to a wealth of technical expertise, letting you build absolutely whatever you want. If you dream of building an app that provides customized recommendations based on exercise, nutrition, and sleep, you may need to hire someone who can program something very complicated.
Working with a developer or an agency has a lot of benefits, but you’ll pay for them. Building a custom app could cost upwards of $20,000 and there’s no ceiling. You’ll get a pro-level, completely customized app, but this price tag isn’t realistic for most creators.
6. Launch your app and start building your community
Once your app is built (which could take 30 days with a no-code platform or over six months with complex development from an agency), it’s time to get it in front of your audience. After it’s on the app store, your primary task will be marketing your fitness app.
Here are a few ways that fitness creators have found success in marketing their apps:
Leverage social media
If you have a social media following or you regularly share your content online, you already have an audience that values your content. Tell them about your app regularly and make sure they know they can get more of the content that they love.
Uscreen customer Find What Feels Good is a great example. While the popular YouTube channel Yoga With Adriene has over 13 million subscribers, Adriene Mishler and her business partner Chris Sharpe wanted to offer an app-based experience with a content library and more advanced yoga offerings.
Once they had launched their app, Mishler and Sharpe had a huge audience that they could market their subscription to. You may not be a fitness influencer with 13 million subscribers, but even a few dozen is a great place to start with marketing your app.
Find media opportunities
If you can get your brand and ideas in front of more people, you’ll have a great shot at driving more sign-ups. One way you can expand your audience is to partner with people who are already talking to your ideal customers.
Can you get on a podcast to talk about how you approach fitness differently? What about a YouTube channel? Could you pitch an article to a news outlet and include a link to your website? If there are newsletters, social media accounts, or other places you might be able to earn a mention, it’s worth spending some time figuring out how to take advantage.
Hosting an online workshop is another option, and one of our recommended strategies for making money in fitness online.
Optimize your app store copy
App store optimization is the practice of making sure your app’s title, descriptions, and reviews are helping people find your app.
We have an entire guide to app store optimization, and it’s a great place to start.
Emphasize community
Your marketing and the value of your content will bring users to your app. Community will keep them there and encourage them to invite their friends (that’s one of the reasons that online fitness communities are trending in 2025).
There are many ways to build a sense of community around your fitness app, including fitness challenges, live streams, interacting with members, welcoming new users individually, and encouraging members to interact with each other.
The Bloom Method is a pre- and post-natal fitness app and community, and founder Brooke Cates says that community is one of her favorite parts of her membership community. With public and private channels for members to communicate in, moderated conversations, and mobile calendaring, every member feels like part of the Bloom family.
That sense of community helps The Bloom Method bring in over $1 million every year.
5 Lead Magnet Strategies That Actually Convert for Membership Owners
Get started building your fitness app today
The most important step in launching a fitness app is getting started. If you have an idea, it’s worth pursuing – and you can turn it into a success. You just need to take the first step.
So start brainstorming. Start planning. Dream up the app that you want to share with the world. Maybe it’s a personal training app with a strong emphasis on inclusive fitness. Or a yoga streaming service. It could be something completely new that no one has thought of yet. Whatever it is, it’s yours.
And when you’re ready to start building it, Uscreen will be here to help. If you’re ready to start talking about how we can help you turn your dream into a reality, you can start the conversation by reading about our app-building process or checking out our on-demand demo.
If you’re not quite ready yet, take a look at some of the successful health and fitness brands we’ve worked with in the past. Maybe one of them will inspire you to launch your own fitness app!
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