6 Ways Mobile Apps Can Create a Revolution in Gyms and Fitness Centers

Fitness is today an $80 Billion market with 5 billion dollars from the US. With over 70 million Americans taking up a gym membership each year, the market for fitness is likely to double in the US alone. With such strong trends in place, it is important to understand how mobile app developers can benefit from this well-established arena.

Today, there are several mobile apps and gadgets that are aimed at health and fitness conscious users.  Here are the benefits offered by mobile applications in this domain:

1. Personalized Workout Instructions: Each member who visits a gym definitely has a unique body type and needs to be offered a dedicated workout regimen. Analytics built into apps can plan a user’s workout schedule based on the inputs from the instructor and can get the desired results.
2. Diet Strategies: Diet is an integral part of a fitness plan. Developing a diet strategy can now be made effective with the use of analytics. Individual diet plans based on the user’s metabolism can be calculated and the plan with the most positive results can be chalked out.
3. Alerts and Messages: Offering 24X7 assistance to members is possible thanks to push notifications that can deliver important information from the promoters of the gym. Other information such as aggregate workout info, health-tips, and motivational messages can be sent directly to the app.
4. Scheduling: These apps also make it easy for gym members to set up appointments with their dedicated trainers and stay connected with them. From booking slots for the spa to scheduling a meet with the dietician, all activities at the gym can be planned well in advance.
5. Promotions and Cross Marketing: These apps also offer a promotional platform for the owners of the gym. They can promote their other associated brands and their products through push notifications. This gives them more visibility and increases reach.
6. Payments: The payment for the gym can be simplified by integrating a payment gateway into the app. From credit cards to mobile wallets, a variety of payment options can be incorporated into the application, thereby offering flexibility to users.

Tap into the lucrative fitness market and create an app that helps you build your brand. Enlist the services of Openwave, a globally acclaimed mobile app developer and avail affordable world-class development solutions.

Best Practices to Enabling Secure Mobile Payments on Your App

Are you planning to accept mobile payments on your app, or are you in the process of building one with the feature? The majority of apps out there are proving to be easy prey to hackers. It is crucial that any transactions that are being carried out on your application be secure – it will involve credit card numbers and bank account information of your customers, the security of which cannot be compromised.

There are two major areas you must secure: the user interface and the mobile payment system.

How to go about securing the interface?

The payment user interface is where customers will input their information. To keep it secure, it must:

• Allow access only after validation: Most of the safest apps have a 2-step validation process that lets users initiate a transaction only after their identity has been confirmed. This identity confirmation can be launched through fingerprint scanning, face scanning or mobile number confirmation.
• Auto-formatting: Auto-formatting involves setting up a form with clear and legible fields, telling users exactly how and where to input their data, and auto-correcting it and formatting the data as it is being entered.

How to go about securing payments

 The best way to ensure all the transactions on the application remain safe is to comply with OS guidelines, which vary, and to keep your app updated. You should also follow PCI guidelines, which include:

• Barring super-users from installing the app: Some devices are jailbroken by their users. Jailbreaking is an unsafe practice that can open the device up to hackers. By preventing your app from being installed on vulnerable phones, you can prevent it from being hacked.
• Remote disability feature: What happens if the device on which the application has been installed gets stolen? With a remote disabling function, you will be able to delete or disable the user account and prevent the thief from initiating a transaction.

These are, by no means, the only security guidelines you need to follow. If you don’t have experience with programming, we recommend hiring a mobile app development team to upgrade your app to ensure it has tight security.

5 Tips to Get the Maximum Out Of Mobile Application Analytics

When you set out to build a mobile app, a well-planned strategy and solid development are a must and a neat design is paramount. But analytics is the key to measuring execution and the value of all hard work you’ve put into building the app. As mobiles continue to penetrate every aspect of our lives, it is but natural that developers and marketers alike are constantly trying to measure user behaviour through app analytics. While the mobile app industry might be young, there are a number of platforms and services vying with each other to provide you with good app data.

Start Using Analytics Before Your Application Is In the Appstore

There’s no use if you start thinking about analytics after your application has been accepted in the Appstore. You can create a more robust, user-friendly version1 if you start analysing data during your application’s alpha and beta phases. You could use Test flight for example.

Users May Not Use Your App the Way You Do

You’ve meticulously planned your app’s design, functionality and flow, but you still need to be able to think like the user. Get third party opinion by asking unbiased users to use your application. Put websites like Craigslist and heatmap which uses heat maps to enable you to see which part of your application users interact with to good use.

Analyse Market Data to Avoid Mistakes of Your Competitors

While analytics providers may be a bit expensive, it is still worthwhile to see what other apps are doing in the market, their price and functionality. With this information, you can make decisions knowing how consumer preferences and application performances in your category.

Select KPIS That Suit Your Target Audience

There are a variety of apps for a variety of things. There are apps for education, testprep, epub, news, messaging, movies and entertainment. Each has a performance indicator of its own. User retention might be important for a particular application while purchase conversion would expectedly, be paramount for an ecommerce application. It is important to know what metric to focus on for your app.

Different Providers for Different Apps

Again, this boils down to knowledge. You need to know which analytics provider caters to which vertical. Localytics and Platyomics are both analytics providers, but one caters to content delivery while the other is for mobile gaming.

As mobile users grow at a rapid pace, mobile analytics too would catch up. Which means you’ve got to keep pace as the scenario keeps changing.