How to Develop a Meditation App?

Stress and the need for mindfulness have increased far more than how much we have progressed in this century. For everyone to lead a happy life, they require some time alone, meditating, and relaxing, but in the fast-paced life we currently have, it becomes almost impossible.  

With meditation apps like Calm and Headspace, one can do so in just a few mins, and gain back control over through the features these apps offer. Whether a user is looking for a goodnight’s sleep or just looking to calm themselves, meditation apps play a crucial role.  

If you are planning to get your own meditation app developed, you are at the right place. We have made a guide about the features, meditation app development technologies, and who to get the app developed in the most efficient way. Read on to know all about it.  

How to Develop a Meditation Mobile App?  

Step 1: Making a List of Features 

The market is already populated with apps like calm and headspace, and to make your place in it, you need to fixate on features you want in your meditation app. This is an essential part of developing your mediation app. These features will be the USP of your app offering and will decide why users would choose your app over competitors like Calm and Headspace. 

Personalisation 

The greatest feature to include in your meditation app is the personalisation feature, but you will have to set up an entire team for it. You will need to hire psychology experts to build a questionnaire or from which you can know the specific liking and requirements of a user. While Calm and Headspace offer a lot of personalisation, you can always create something better with more effort and ideas, which can be a USP of your app offering.  

Sleep Monitoring  

People usually opt for sleep monitoring apps more than we assume, so it’s better to sum it up with a meditation app offering to get the best of both worlds. You can take it two steps further by integrating data generated from devices like the Apple Watch, enabling insights users won’t find anywhere else. The most important reason to include this feature is matching the goal of the user getting a peaceful and fulfilling sleep, which exactly resonates with the purpose of the app.  

Video Stream 

Offering meditation, yoga, mindfulness videos should be considered as primary when developing a meditation app. We aren’t questioning your idea or particular way to building a meditation app, but the basic purpose of one is served with this feature. If you can stretch your budget a bit more and afford to integrate video streaming and playback in your app, any meditation app development company would be able to do it for you.  

Audio Stream 

Video isn’t the only way of letting users interact and gain something from the app. Audio streams, podcasts, brown/pink, ASMR, and other different types of noises, are all something you can leverage to offer something more to users. If you are worried about the meditation app development cost, this feature will cost you a bit more but could be definitely worth it in the long term.  

Payment Options 

Nothing comes for free, and if you don’t plan to offer your app services for free either, you need to include payment options within the app. Freemium apps are the new ways businesses offer both an ultimate experience and a source of earning money. We can design your app specifically in a way to offer certain features to only premium users who have subscribed and paid and general features for other users.  

Social Integration 

The whole idea might seem a bit off to anyone creating a meditation app; the goal is to escape all of that for a while, right? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be a way to remain connected, just subtly. Integration social platform builds a sense of confidence in users; people think of meditation as a sport and would love to share how much better they are at it to the world.  

Support 

Extensive support is essential when creating a meditation app like Calm or Headspace; it isn’t just required at many points of time but also boosts the confidence of users in an app. Including a chatbot can be a great way to let users explore the app, even though it might drive the meditation app development cost a bit up. The key is to offer the best support to the users, as this is what most users care about the most in the current time.

Step 2: The Development Part  

There are many choices to make when getting on the development front of a meditation app. You need to choose the technology, the development path, the platforms, how can you maximise your app’s popularity and more. Choosing the right development platform and technologies will help you save money, and we aren’t talking about a dollar or two. You can even save up to 50% of meditation app development costs through proper guidance and hiring a capable meditation app development company. 

The major decisions you need to make on the development end includes:   

The Development Platform for Your Meditation Mobile App  

You must be aware that there are two very different mobile OSs having the most market share today. You would probably want your app to work on both phones, right? Let’s get to the point, you will have to build two separate apps to leverage the best of capabilities of either OS. This means double effort, double cost, and double maintenance and support for the future. But if you can compromise a few things, cross-platform apps can be built using one codebase, through which you can end up saving 1000s of dollars. Let’s see both the options below.   

Native applications: 2 different applications for iOS and Android (with more if you want to target more). There is nothing better than native app development for the most capable and high-performance applications if you want the absolute best. The downsides are the high cost of development and maintenance of two separate apps. 

Cross-platform application development: Cross-platform app development technologies like Flutter and React Native let you build an app capable of running with minor tweaks on almost every platform. These apps are capable; all you would miss out on is a bit of performance and sensor use requirements. Apart from that, a capable meditation company can build a perfect app for you for use on all popular platforms. 

Choosing Team Members for your Meditation App Development  

It all depends on the capabilities which do the groundwork in building your app, and you should put extra effort into choosing the best development team/partner. A typical mobile app development team consists of: 

• A Project manager   
• App developers   
• UI/ UX experts   
• QA and testers  
• Digital marketers  
• Technology Stack   

Choosing the perfect technology stack lets you gain more at a lesser cost and time. Right from choosing APIs to databases, if you are planning to build the app on your own falls on your shoulder. If you hire a mobile app development company, they will do the choosing for you, but it is always to know your options before making a choice.  

Native App Development  

• Swift (iOS development)  
• Android Studio (Android development)   
• Cross-platform app development  
• React Native (Cross-platform development framework)  
• Flutter (Cross-platform development framework)  
• Ionic (Cross-platform development framework)  
• Xamarin (Cross-platform development framework)   

Data analytics tools  

• Python  
• Java  
• Amazon EC2  
• Amazon S3  
• Kafka  
• Scala  
• Amazon VPC  
• Amazon EMR  
• Apache Impala   

Utilities  

• Elastic Search   
• DevOps  
• Chef  
• AWS CloudFormation   

Databases  

• Aerospike  
• MongoDB  
• Cassandra  
• HBase  
• MySQL  
• Postgre 

Step 3: Who to Hire?  

Setting up your Own Team  

You can hire the team mentioned above individually and let them work to build an app for you. This method depends on various factors that include your location, developer availability, budget as this way of building the apps is the most expensive one and time on your hands as it will require some time to find and build a team. We recommend planning everything out in the beginning as stepping back from this becomes impossible.  

Hire Freelance Developers  

There are freelancers all over the world willing to work remotely for developing apps. The issues arise when they have prior ongoing engagements and won’t deliver the tasks assigned to them on time. This method is certainly cheaper compared to both hiring a team or a mobile app development company, but don’t be deceived with low per hour cost. You would actually end up paying way more to hire people to manage them efficiently and lose more opportunities as your app could take much more time to build.  

Hire an App Development Company  

The IT sector has grown very rapidly in the past 2 decades, and there are a lot of options to choose from when it comes to app development companies. This option can be the safest and the cheapest bet, as you would find developers as well as other resources like marketers with an app development company. Turnkey project models make it easier for you to focus on important things you are capable of, and the app development experts can build your meditation app per your requirements. 

Recommended Read – How To Hire An Android App Development Company?

Are you Ready to Develop your Own Meditation Application?  

Meditation apps are highly popular, and we see them increasing in the coming years. Whichever features you want, whatever customisation you are looking for, the mobile app developers at Matellio have experience in building highly capable meditation mobile apps. If you are interested in hiring a capable mobile app company, we at Matellio can build the app the way you want while fitting your time and budget requirements. To know more, contact us now with your requirements/ideas, and we will get back to you within 24 hours.