How To Develop A Guided Meditation App Like Headspace or Calm

Meditation, Yoga & Good Sleep are three things that have become a staple in everyone’s lives to ensure good health considering the amount of stress they have to deal with every day in their work and personal lives.

In the pandemic, everyone has realized the importance of mental health and today more and more people are aware of it and taking the steps towards it. In order to calm the monkey mind, meditation is being recommended not just by the spiritual teachers but even doctors, mental health professionals, therapists, and psychologists all across the world. It truly has become a way of life.

Now for some people, the meditation practice comes easily, while for the others, they have to make efforts and require support. This brings us to the huge prominence of meditation mobile apps. Yes, today everyone is just a tap away to find calm away from their super hectic life or ever-chattering mind. These meditation mobile apps make it easy for people to get into that meditative zone and relax their brains.

With the demand for meditation apps increasing day-by-day, this popularity is attracting more and more people to enter the industry and earn a good sum of money.

In case you are someone looking to create your own meditation app, then this article covers all the details to come up with an amazing meditation mobile app. It covers market statistics, benefits, features, team structure, app development cost, and a lot more.

Market Statistics Related to Meditation Apps, Services & Trends

In the list of meditation apps, there is this leading app named Headspace, which has proved its mettle with its annual revenue exceeding $100 million. This shows that the success rate of self-care apps is pretty high. There are even statistics presenting that the US market of meditation apps is worth 1.21 billion, and by 2022, it is expected to be worth two billion.

As per Think with Google

Searches or Queries for yoga and meditation apps, such as “mindfulness apps” or “yoga for beginners app,” grew 65% YoY.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) reports that in the U.S., 18 million adults are using meditation apps to enhance their mental state and health.

As per App Annie, Calm (one of the leading meditation apps) is the highest-earning health & fitness app on iOS, whereas SensorTower reveals that Calm app made a revenue of $4million by May 2020.

Headspace vs Calm: Revenue Till 2019

Leading Mindfulness & Yoga iOS Apps Worldwide 2017, by Revenue in USD

Types of Meditation Apps Usually Offer

Calming Anxiety

The meditation applications are useful to calm down an anxious mind by offering guided & unstructured video of around 20 minutes (the time differs from app-to-app).

Stress Management

These meditation apps help in determining stress level and reduce it through meditation tools that consist of images & music.

Deep Sleep

Meditation mobile apps create a nice aura through relaxing music of nature and melody. This helps users in experiencing calm that promotes sleep.

Focus & Concentration

These applications allow their users to block distraction from other apps, texts, calls, and this allows them to focus and concentrate better during work.

Relationship

Few of the apps offering advanced features allow their users in connecting and maintaining healthy and sound relationships that increase their energy.

Habit & Goal Tracker

The apps allow its users to break habits through its tool that is useful in tracking habits & realizing their goals. It may consist of notifications, reminders (can be customized), and a lot more.

Attain Happiness

The apps offer several features that help their users to experience true happiness. It may consist of guided meditation sessions, nature sounds, and several step-by-step processes to stay in a peaceful and happy space.

Self-Esteem

Most of these meditation apps offer this functionality that is helpful in boosting the self-esteem of the users by bringing their attention to positive aspects of life.

Mindfulness

Being aware is a boon and these apps through their Daily Calm sessions allow their users to relax & refocus their awareness.

How Meditation Apps Like Headspace or Calm Work?

Meditation apps help users to practice the calmness of the body. The app offers guided breathing exercises, soothing audio, and meditation. Here is how the app works:

1. Login/Sign Up 

The new users have to register in the app, filling in all the details and the issue the user is facing. Users who have already registered once have to log in to the app and get started. 

2. Set Goals

The user can customize the goals as per the requirement. The app contains multiple options, such as time periods for meditation, sound therapy, and many more. 

3. Start your Journey

Once you set your goals and personalize the app as per your needs, it is ready to use. Users can start focusing on practicing yoga. 

4. Notifications and Alerts

Features like reminders and notifications are also available in the app that remind you to start your yoga at the time you do every day. The app also notifies you of any new program introduced, and you can check on it. 

5. Subscribe, Pay, and Relax

There are multiple programs available on these platforms that take minimal fees and give you other benefits such as doctors’ advice and more. 

The meditation apps available are for relaxing your body and soul. This can be a good routine for all people and is an approach to a healthy life. They are often user-friendly and easy-to-use apps that can used by anyone.

Monetization Opportunities For Meditation Apps

Before building a meditation app discussing the monetization strategies for such apps is a must. There are several options to choose for generating revenue via meditation apps such as:

Subscription

Most meditation apps are using this strategy to monetize their app. In this, as the user installs an app, s/he gets one or two weeks of free trial. As the trial period ends, the user then has to buy a paid subscription for continued app usage or to get access to the advanced app features.

In-App Purchases

In this model, the app users are required to pay for unlocking premium content, like some specific meditation session packs, or paid features.

Pay Per Download

This is not a regularly used monetization method for these types of apps. However, there are apps like Buddhify that use it. Here to download the app, the user has to buy it in the App Store or PlayStore. The Mediation app owners using this strategy to monetize usually charges a fee from 25 to 30 percent of the app cost.

Advertisements

In this monetization model, the app owners can charge the other businesses cost-per mile or cost-per-click to run advertisements on their app platform. This model usually works best for apps with a huge number of daily active users.

eCommerce Integration

This is yet again a great monetization strategy, where the users can integrate eCommerce functionality to sell related products and services and make money through it.

Which Are The Most Popular Meditation Apps Out There?

Without any doubt, Calm and Headspace are the most successful apps in the domain of meditation apps. Then there are other apps as well like Buddhify, Aura, Inscape, Insight Timer, etc. Here we have discussed a few of them:

Headspace

Hands down the best guided meditation app as considered by the Americans, Headspace is widely advertised and what warms up the users is its cartoonish interface. It feels pretty welcoming as this is the reason that even the beginners first using the app can be captivated by its appeal. The app offers a selection of meditation for anxiety, sleep, stress, happiness, and everything you think of, will be found in this app. It certainly has it all.

Another unique feature of the app is that it offers meditation aided by workout sessions with professional trainers. Considering the Covid situation and its ill-effects on people’s wellbeing, the app is offering a year of free premium access for people who lost their apps. Quite a good marketing strategy as well as a thoughtful act.

Calm

This comes next to Headspace in terms of success in the market. Unlike the cartoonish theme of Headspace, Calm on the other hand is all about blue hues & natural images, and the whole appeal is very calming. For those struggling with sleep or anxiety, Calm is an app preferred by them. The app also offers a variety of guided meditations.
Meanwhile, there are two main features of the app:

• Wide-ranging music for meditation & mindfulness practice.
• Sleep stories

Inscape

The Inscape meditation app is by a meditation studio in New York City and what sets it apart is its creative playlist, named Tinder Troubles, Urban Meditations, Return to Peace, 3 Minutes to Rest, and a lot more. Also, for users residing in New York City, they can buy stuff like candles, oils, and other items related to the meditation practice from its shop via Postmates Delivery.

Buddhify

Again a great meditation app, however, what sets Buddhify apart from the rest of the short meditation sessions it allows its users to do, anytime, anywhere. They can do it while walking, community, while tea break, or at any moment when they are free for a while.

So, these were a few of the prominent apps, next let’s move on to the features.

Important Attributes of Meditation Mobile App

Visual Design

The purpose of using meditation apps is to relax and unwind. And as colors have a huge impact on our perception of things and on our mood, it becomes essential to use the color theory while creating a meditation app.

Most of the prominent meditation apps out there use a pastel color scheme. Like, there is Headspace, which uses full of mild oranges, faded blues, greens, and yellows. The calm app is mostly green and blue. Aggressive colors or bold colors are not usually considered appropriate for mindfulness apps. The visuals presented in the app should be based on the image the app owner is keen to create on their users’ minds. Hence, utmost attention needs to be given to the app’s visual design.

Onboarding

This again is a very crucial aspect of meditation apps as it greatly affects the user experience with the apps. Often the people using meditation apps are new to this experience and many are skeptical to use it. Hence it works best to make the onboarding engaging and captivating so they stay with your app.

Apart from present nice visuals, consider showing short videos explaining what is meditation and its impact on our mind, health, mood, and overall life. Make the onboarding interesting and interactive and easily understood. It can help to have a look at Headspace for a good idea on onboarding. It presents in a way that it appears like Instagram stories and successfully appeals to its users.

Research by Vidyard says that it is best when the length of explanatory/introductory video is between 30 to 60 seconds and that demos are kept within 5 minutes, not longer than that, so the users will watch them till the end. Hence if you consider doing a video/animations for onboarding, stay focused on touching the most fascinating features of your app. Everything else can be explained or covered later.

General Features To Include In A Meditation & Mindfulness App

User Panel Features

• Social Sign up & Profile Management
• Breathing Exercise Sessions
• Sleep Stories for relaxing
• Audio/Video Guide for guided meditation
• Add favorite meditation tracks and sessions
• Meditation sessions based on level (beginner, intermediate or advanced)
• Meditation guide sessions and video consultation with experts
• Meditation reminders
• Submit feedback, reviews and ratings
• Track progress
• Customized sessions based on age, gender, etc.

Admin Panel Features

• Secure Sign in
• Manage Meditation Programs
• Users and meditation sessions management
• Upload/Manage Audio and videos for meditation programs
• Analytics and Reports
• Managing ratings and reviews
• Managing subscriptions, discounts and offers

Advanced Features To Add In A Meditation App

Social Login/Signup

Using this functionality, the users can log in/signup to the app using their social media accounts. Hence there won’t be any requirement to fill in long details to signup or fill in details each time to log in.

Push Notifications

This functionality is crucial for the meditation mobile apps, as this would allow sending messages instantly to the users, either to remind them of their upcoming meditation sessions or other useful updates. Allowing customization for reminders can also work favorably for the meditation apps.

Favorite Playlist

There are a certain group of people for whom tracks work better and they can easily fall into the meditation practice with them. Hence, in your app, you can allow your users to create a list of favorite/liked/bookmarked tracks, so they can instantly play them as they come to the app for meditation practice.

Gamification

This tool works wonders for user engagement with the app. Virtually everyone loves to compete, while some compete with the others, some compete with themselves. As an app owner, one can consider running an A/B test on their target audience to find which gamification model they prefer.

Leader-boards

It is vital for an app like a meditation app to have goal trackers. There are people using meditation apps with a focus on eating disorders, depression, weight loss, hence having trackers are required. This way the users will be able to maintain leader-boards and constantly see their progress.

Wearables Integration

Today more and more apps are integrated with the functionality to send alerts/notifications to their smartwatches and fitness trackers. Hence it can benefit the meditation apps as well.

Recommendation

To offer a personalized experience to your users, consider using recommendation functionality (via machine learning technology) for your meditation app. With the use of this technology, the app would be able to remember and analyze the meditations used by the user and can then recommend similar ones – by theme, purpose, and narrator.

Real-Time Analytics

This functionality allows the app owner to analyze the app performance in real-time. The users’ behavior and their interaction with the app can be observed. This will give the idea regarding where the app can do with certain enhancements or more features.

Effective CRM

With the help of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a good rapport can be maintained with the customers, their grievances can be sorted timely and it would benefit the app performance tremendously.

Loyalty Programs

Every customer likes being appreciated and treated from time-to-time and this functionality offers just that as it enables to treat users constantly with gifts, discounts, coupons, and a lot more.

Offline Playback of Meditation Tracks

There are times when there is no internet connectivity and thus users appreciate this option to be able to downloads the meditation tracks and be able to play them whenever desired.

Payments

It is crucial for an app to integrate a payment functionality offering multiple payment gateways to the users so they are able to make easy payments to the app for the services chosen by them.

Steps To Develop A Meditation App Like Headspace or Calm

Here are the various phases of developing a meditation app

• Decide on your business idea for a meditation app
• Define your target audience & identify their need
• Perform competitor research
• Identify your app’s unique value proposition
• Select the monetization model and strategies
• Select the right approach to create an intuitive UI/UX
• Choose the mobile app development platform
• Consider gamification for user acquisition and engagement
• Create an MVP model to test your app idea
• Create a marketing strategy and launch your app

Technology Stack For Developing A Meditation App

• Application and Data: jQuery, PHP, CloudFlare, Apache HTTP Server, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2,
  Amazon CloudFront, CentOS, Moment.js
• Utilities: Google Analytics, Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, Mailgun, Optimizely
• DevOps: Parcel
• Business Tools: G Suite, Contentful
• Some other technologies used were Sketch, Xcode, Android Studio, Google API, Mean Stack, Swift iOS, Stripe, Google Webmaster, etc.

How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Meditation App?

There are several app development companies out there with experience in developing meditation apps and to get the app developed, one should check the past work, development cost offered the expertise of development team and their experience mostly.

There are a number of aspects that need to be considered to determine the cost of meditation app development, such as:

Hourly App Development Rates

The hourly rate of app development differs as per the region chosen to create the app. Like, the hourly development rates are high in the regions of USA, Europe, and others, while the costs are lesser in the Indian continent while the quality provided is usually great depending on the company chosen for the purpose of development and its past workings.

Number of Platforms

If the app is being developed for a single platform, it would cost less when compared to the app development for more than one platform. Like, to get the app developed for more than one platform, more than one development team would be required to hire and this would accordingly double the development cost. Meanwhile, the app development team is going to be consisted of:

• Project Manager
• App Developers (iOS or Android, or both as decided by the client)
• Backend Developers
• UX/UI Designers
• Quality Analysis Experts

Features

Next comes the features integrated into the app. If the app is developed with the basic features, it would cost less when compared to an app developed with advanced features and third-party technologies.

Now as it comes to the app cost, the development of an app with basic features and for a single platform would cost somewhere between $25000-$35000, whereas an app with advanced features and for more than one platform, would cost almost double somewhere between $50000-$60000.

Wrapping Up

So, we hope this post helped you figure out how to create a meditation app that will help the users improve their lives as well as generate revenue. If you have a unique idea to build a meditation app then Emizentech can help you turn that idea into reality. We have an amazing team of mobile app developers who have worked on several app ideas. So, get in touch with us and enjoy the services of one of the best app development company.