Using mental wellness applications has become a new trend in the modern world. Meditation apps are among the leading types of purchased health apps in the US. Globally, mobile mental wellness apps are expected to generate $491 mln in consumer spending by 2022. Therefore, learning how to create a meditation app can be a game-changer for your business.
In this article, we will describe the ins and outs of this process. Read on to get insights based on our experience in meditation software development.
Why Do People Meditate?
A rough estimate of people who meditate regularly ranges between 200 and 500 million worldwide. Moreover, meditation is scientifically proven to enhance general wellness and energy, aid memory and focus, and help with anxiety, stress, depression relief, etc.
Online meditation sessions are perfect for people with special needs and residents of rural areas, as accessing offline practices is challenging for them. However, the ability to exercise whenever and wherever they want can appeal to many people.
Thus, meditation apps appeal to many users, making potentially profitable businesses. But how to build a successful app? Let’s define what a meditation app is first.
What is a Meditation Application? The Key Features
Meditation apps teach people how to use various techniques to unwind, clear their minds, and reduce stress.
To illustrate every feature and show how to create a meditation app, we used two popular apps — Calm and Headspace. Despite their differences, they have pretty standard functionality. However, a great user experience is crucial to winning the consumers’ love. Pay attention to how those two apps address this challenge.
Onboarding
An impeccable onboarding experience is a must for your app. This functionality guides the customers when they open an app for the first time.
Thus, onboarding must be as simple as possible for all users. As a result, users should be able to start using your app effortlessly.
Calm encourages users to proceed by showing a purple ombre screen, establishing the mood and declaring that this app’s aim is relaxation.
Then a brief questionnaire is shown to learn more about the user’s interests. Customers can skip the quiz if they wish to begin their meditation immediately.
Finally, they’re offered subscription plans. To enjoy all of Calm’s features, people just need to register or log in using a Google, Apple, Facebook, or email address and password.
Headspace has a similar but shorter onboarding process. It begins with a query regarding the user’s objectives. Following that, users are informed of subscription options and are urged to explore the app.
Home Page
A well-designed home page draws consumers’ attention and encourages them to stick with the app. It should convey the key information and serve as a manual.
In its home page design, Calm uses pastoral landscapes, like river and mountain animated views. The main page offers a variety of ways to relax, including daily meditations, mental exercises, and sleep tales.
Headspace’s home page, on the contrary, chooses to display a daily meditation schedule. Additionally, the user is also given the option to access the profile or add favourite meditations.
Play Screen
Like a home page, a play screen in meditation apps must be simple but calming. It often has a control panel, background animations, and a big ‘Play’ button in the middle. The colours and animations are selected to match the meditation’s atmosphere.
In both Calm and Headspace, the screen backgrounds and colours may be adjusted to reflect the speaker’s voice tone as well as the session’s overall mood.
Meditation Sessions
Meditation software should provide a wide range of exercises, breathing techniques, and meditations. Thus, users will have the freedom of choice. You need high-quality content if you want your users to keep using your app.
Calm displays meditations and exercises individually or by playlists on the home page. Additionally, you may click on the several categories on the homepage to view relevant sessions. Visitors can also search by specific criteria, e.g., by a particular narrator.
Headspace’s meditation and workout programs are presented with four tabs: Meditate, Sleep, Move, and Focus.
There are numerous folder types with relevant meditations under each tab.
Notifications and Reminders
Notifications are essential for user engagement and remarketing. They are an effective tool to inform consumers about new features, promotions, or freebies.
Different types of notifications can complement each other: bedtime notifications, mood check-ins, wake-up reminders, gratitude check-ins, meditation reminders, and so on.
Making alerts customizable is the best approach. Give consumers as much control over notifications as possible, as not all users like them and may become frustrated.
User Profile
A crucial component that can increase retention is a customized user profile.
User profiles provide a seamless transition across devices. Additionally, they may gather user preferences with the help of machine-learning analytics.
Headspace and Calm feature built-in dashboards so users can view their accomplishments and progress. It encourages meditators to keep on.
However, there is a difference between those two apps. Headspace provides a separate page for users to add friends, whereas Calm allows users to save their favourite materials.
How we Developed Ad Astra, Advanced Meditation App
S-PRO is a pro player in the market of meditation software development. We deal with the most complex tasks for the benefit of our clients. Our developer team’s exceptional expertise and experience allow us to build top-notch wellness apps. One of them is Ad Astra — a meditation and personal development software helping gifted individuals distribute their material.
What makes Ad Astra special? It is an app for meditation and personal development that provides quality meditation courses and audio tracks.
Our client came to S-PRO seeking means to build an intuitive partner platform for meditators and creators. We built an array of features that boost user performance through this app. The users can:
- select and manage tracks: pause, seek, skip and resume playing
- find educational meditations
- enhance sleeping with sleep meditations
- take notes in a diary
- set goals and track the progress
- manage administrative panel for content producers
- invest through 5,000 NFTs featuring in-app characters of aliens with different properties and rarity levels.
During the planning and business analysis phase, our design team examined the client’s initial sketches. After discussion, these ideas transformed into solid UI/UX design. Our front-end and back-end developers built a solid app that conformed to the requirements and up-to-date development trends. The QA specialists ensured that the app was stable and had no bugs.
In the end, our team created a simple-to-use application. The diary component of the app received a workbook-like format. The administrative panel was developed for creators to commercialize their meditation material.
How to Build a Meditation App like Ad Astra
How to create a meditation app? The answer to this question depends on the peculiarities of the project: business goals, development team type, scope of work, platform, etc. In this section, we gathered the most beneficial strategies for you to create your own meditation app. Using them, you will build an advanced app valued by its users.
Choose a Type
There are many types of relaxation and meditation apps in the market. Which one is better to develop? Further, we describe the pros and cons of each.
Guided Meditation
Guided meditation means specially instructed meditation recordings organized into categories like anxiety or stress reduction, SOS meditations, etc. Brief animations describing how to meditate guide the new users.
Apps for Morning Mindfulness Meditation
Typically, these applications offer a selection of calming sounds or even mantras for meditation. Also, they often have a timer to track meditation sessions or master breathing techniques.
In particular, Calm is a vivid example. Its users can access sleep tales, customized sound settings, mindfulness reminders, session history, etc.
Network Applications for Meditators
Like ordinary social networking apps, these applications strive to build communities where users may exchange experiences. They unite users into various subjects, offer an FAQ section for new users, and even geolocation tools to find local meditators.
All the above are present in the Insight Timer network app. With lecturers from the Universities of Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, Insight Timer features a collection of podcasts written by mindfulness specialists in neuroscience, psychology, and education.
Validate Your Idea
Before spending time and money on the development, you should validate your idea, even if it sounds novel and groundbreaking.
Create the plan answering these questions:
- Do you want to draw in new users, seasoned users, or both?
- What issues do you hope to resolve, and how do you intend to do it?
- What types of activities will your app offer?
- What exceptional value would your software offer?
- Which functionalities in your app are must-haves, and which are optional?
- How will you monitor the app’s effectiveness?
- How are you going to make money off this app?
Once you have an idea, you can ask custom software companies to get time and cost estimates for development.
Hire your Development Team
If you lack experience in app development, consider an outsource meditation software development company. You do not need to create your development team in-house. Hired developers will build apps in compliance with the relevant legislation.
You may ask for recommendations on LinkedIn and familiarize yourself with company reviews on Clutch. List your top candidates and arrange a meeting to discuss your concept with each of them.
Create a List of Requirements
You may create apps for both platforms: Android and iOS. However, if you have a low budget, choose only one platform.
While deciding, consider that Android and iOS users have distinct demographics. As a result, it impacts the target audience, including their preferences, geography, level of education, and income.
The alternate strategy is to create a cross-platform project in React Native or Flutter. However, in this case, the app losses its ability to support native OS functionality, such as Apple ID authorization, etc.
Initially, our app will have a small number of meditation tracks, but it will grow with time. For that purpose, we advise building mobile back-end services with cloud technologies at the initial stage. It will prevent scalability problems in the future.
Additionally, cloud technologies reduce the amount of data on users’ devices, enable data synchronization across many devices, send messages and notifications, and reduce excessive battery loss.
Thus, robust architecture depends on a platform, programming language, and cloud integration. After you have it covered, a meditation app design is next.
Develop A Meditation App Design Concept
The meditation app’s design process resembles blade running. It is easy to ruin the right atmosphere, as people use meditation apps because they seek relaxation, relief, and sometimes a short escape from reality.
The following design advice will help you to grasp the idea of a compelling meditation app design proved by the most popular meditation apps.
- Use pastel colors for a more natural palette. They shall bring peace and relaxation.
- Less is more. Use only a few design components at once. Avoid over-detailed illustrations and extra fine lines in typefaces and pictures. Rounded corners are better than sharp ones.
- Use the best engaging techniques like introducing animations, lovely characters, etc. Refrain from overloading screens with text, welcome messages, and explanations.
The meditation app design should generally be calming but memorable to retain as many users as possible.
Build an MVP
A minimal viable product (MVP) is a simplified version with all the essential functions and aesthetics. It is required to test the product in the market and attract first customers. Сoncentrate on the must-have features like registration and sign-in, user profiles with stats, onboarding, initial library content, etc.
Once an MVP is launched, you collect the first user feedback and plan the following steps.
Ways to Make Your Meditation App Profitable
Every business wants a successful app. Which tips and tricks can make it much more efficient and valuable for the audience? How to make it bring money? Read answers to these questions further.
Gamification
After you get your first app users through marketing and social media campaigns, you should persuade them to use your app frequently. For this purpose, gamification comes in handy.
Use gamification components, like points, rewards, level systems, and so forth, encouraging users to return to meditation sessions daily.
In the end, you can build an internal ecosystem. First, users get their in-app currency for each meditation and gain a new level or status. Then, they spend these ‘funds’ to get premium content or merch, developing your brand.
It is a win-win strategy: users advance quickly, and you get habitual subscribers.
Live Streaming
Despite the increasing number of meditation apps, there are still good chances to overtake the competitors. For this case, a live video streaming function may be suitable.
You can use Google Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud CDN to provide your app access to a broadcast-quality live feed. They help you to add a live streaming feature to the current mobile app back-end on the Google Cloud platform quickly and cost-effectively.
By live video streaming, you can attract more people to form local societies, invite star specialists, and add more value to your product for customers.
Monetization strategies
To make your app profitable, a good monetization strategy is needed. There are several types of business models used for mobile app monetization. You can choose one or combine them to get the best results.
Subscription
Subscription is the most commonly used model. First, you give a free trial period for new users. They test the functionality and get acquainted with the app. Then, the app users must purchase a paid subscription from the list of offered plans. By paying a monthly, annual, or lifetime price, users gain access to the app’s content.
How much does meditation app cost? Both Headspace and Calm, for instance, use a subscription-based business model. While Calm charges $12.99 or $14.99 per month, Headspace costs $12.99 per month and $69.99 or $94.99 annually.
In-App Purchases
This method allows users to access some of the app’s content for free. However, there are paid premium features, particularly meditations read by famous people and others. Users will pay to unlock premium features like video streaming with a meditation mentor or particular session packs.
Furthermore, you can vary the accessibility depending on the production costs of the content. It will make revenue more predictable.
Pay Per Download
In this case, users must purchase the software to download it. Though this concept is outdated, there are still meditation apps that use this model. Currently, consumers prefer to try an app before buying it.
To illustrate, Buddhify follows this business strategy and charges $4.99 in the App Store and $3.99 in the Google Play Store.
If you want to use this model, you must remember 25 to 30% transaction fees on both platforms. It will seriously affect the overall revenue.
Ads
Advertisements can make additional revenue. It is irritating for most users, but you can minimize its effect.
For instance, select only interesting advertisers or valuable products for your target audience.
Furthermore, for running advertisements on your platform, charge other companies a cost-per-click or cost-per-mile fee. In the former case, they pay for each referral; in the latter, users will have to wait until a promo is over. The second approach is not preferable for meditation apps, as it annoys users.
However, this model is applicable only when apps have a sizable number of active users. Otherwise, the revenue will be insignificant.
Final Touch
Creating advanced and feature-rich meditation software is a big deal. On the one hand, it should improve users’ mental health and lifestyle. On the other, it should be scalable and reliable. The development process is complex, including research, design, MVP creation and improvement.
S-PRO knows all about meditation software development and can help you to create your own meditation app. Our skilled team of developers has the relevant experience. We will arm your app with the most suitable features according to your requirements and budget.
Contact us if you wonder how to make a meditation app. Our specialists will call you within the next 24 hours to discuss the best solutions for your business purposes.
