Do you feel overwhelmed trying to balance work and life, still find yourself feeling anxious and depressed? Does frustration and guilt creep in, leaving you exhausted and helpless?

Even if you want to visit a therapist, most of them are booked for urgent cases. In situations like these, maintaining a healthy work-life balance while managing mental health gets daunting. Here, a mental health app can be a lifesaver in situations like these, for both healthcare service providers and patients.

So, we thought it was time to bring you a complete handbook from development to including mental health app features, you need to start or improve your own therapist app. After all, we can’t afford to miss the chance of speaking to entrepreneurs with a mental health therapy background. What’s your call?

What is a Mental Health App and Why Is It Profitable to Create One?

Building an app for mental health can be immensely rewarding because of its growing demand and market expansion.

Surprisingly, first-time downloads of the top 20 mental wellness apps in the US increased by 30% in Q1 2024, portraying a dynamic interest in digital mental health solutions. Also, mental health app projects like BetterHelp have two-folded their user base, clearly defining that more individuals are in search of help with stress, anxiety and many other mental health conditions through mobile apps.

Talking numbers, the mental health app industry is significantly supported by huge investments, like the U.S government funding $5.5 billion to the (SAMHSA) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2020. Moreover, the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2024 consists of $10.8 billion for SAMHSA, which is $3.3 billion more than the agency’s FY 2023 enacted budget. Its core objective is to support crucial needs in crisis care, youth mental health, and overdose prevention. SAMHSA announced $36.9 million in new funding opportunities to grow the capacity for behavioral health services.

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has also relaxed requirements for counseling apps during the COVID-19 epidemic, nurturing a more favorable climate for new entrants. This utter ease when amalgamated with the forecasted $16.3 trillion economic stimulus loss due to mental disorders by 2030, underlines the urgent need – as well as the market opportunity – for effective mental health apps.

If you are planning to build a mental wellness app, the potential impact on user’s lives and the substantial financial rewards make it an amazing endeavor. Therefore, by addressing both clinical as well as consumer needs, entrepreneurs can make a solution with bespoke mental health app features that not just generate revenue but contribute meaningfully to public health.

Top 10 Features of a Mental Health App You Must Know About

Let’s highlight some of the features of mental health apps you might want to consider for an amazing app.

1. User Profile

Though, a user profile seems like no-brainer, but it’s equally important for your application to feel personal. And, the tried and tested way to accomplish this is by having a profile with user details that affect how the app works. For example, “What time you will go to your gym” or “What time do you go to wake up”.

2. Appointment Scheduling

Ensure your mental wellness app helps patients book appointments with therapists easily. Ideally, your app should support calendars native to your platform. This also implies that there must be patient lists on the back end with the ability to track the time duration of therapy sessions.

3. Notifications

Reminders and notifications help with the interaction challenge that every mental wellness app must solve – people should constantly turn to these apps to achieve tangible results. Moreover, patients can use it to track their meals and medications with experts monitoring patient progress and their stress levels.

4. Socializing Element

Building a live feed where users can share, comment and vote on different topics often help nurture a strong community that will reinforce engagement for individuals in upholding them to work on their mental wellbeing.

5. Intuitive Dashboard

Nowadays, people are obsessed with quantifying themselves, and mental health is no more an exception. Considering that, dashboards are excellent for keeping a track of our cognitive, emotional and other health-related conditions.

6. Self-Tracking

Among many other important features of mental health apps, self-tracking is inevitable.

Before a dashboard turns into an experience, make sure users have an option to monitor their health conditions. As you understand, self-monitoring is crucial if you plan to build an app allowing users to track mental health.

7. In-App Messaging

Messaging is crucial in teletherapy apps bridging patients with remote therapists for a live interaction or in some situations enabling exchange of audio messages. However, integrating a conversational bot can help go a long way for self-monitoring apps.

8. AI and ML Integration

Artificial intelligence is synonymous with personalization. The more your app comprehends about the users, the more it can easily adapt to customer needs.

Our team at Apptunix, can integrate AI technologies to add a chatbot for answering typical questions and assisting patients with preliminary self-assessment. Think of using an avatar-based chatbot to establish trust and simultaneously track a patient’s mood etc.

9. Gamification Aspect

In essence, most of the top mental wellness apps consist of some gamification elements.

Mini-games assist people with their cognitive skills training and relaxing their minds. Furthermore, establishing game-like elements in assessment tests also prove beneficial.

Miscellaneous

There are numerous things to add to your mental wellness app to help people build healthy mental habits. But, it all depends on the specific mental health disorders that you want to address in your app.

• Disorder aggravation
• Attention problem
• Tracking allergies, diet
• Post traumatic stress disorder
• Suicide prevention, LGBTQ bullying

For some specific applications, it’s crucial to connect an app with wearables, for example tracking healthy sleeping hours without pulling data from an app. Another example consists of recent studies suggesting that home-lab blood tests identify not only a patient’s mood but critical illness like schizophrenia and many other mental and health illnesses.

Monetization Strategies for Mental Health Applications

Mental health app features play an important role in choosing the right monetization option.

• Freemium app model
• In-app purchases
• Mobile ads
• Subscription
• Paid premium version

However, if we consider the top-performing mental wellness apps, we’ve seen that most of them have gone for subscription payments. This underscores the fact that today we’re part of a subscription economy, where the ownership price grows over time. Apple itself stated that the subscription revenue model brings more money for apps compared to other options.

What we usually turn blind eye to is “in-app purchases”. This is an equally promising monetization model as users love to try out new games, a session or other meaningful interactions or content.

One more thing to keep note of, when users subscribe outside the app, especially on a company’s website, they are offered a 30% discount that often fills up Apple or Google’s pocket. Therefore, it’s recommended to find ways to skip adding a subscription-based monetization model.

Also, remember that ads should never interrupt the user experience. Indeed, the advertising business model seems wholly right.

To spill the beans, a monetization model will be irrelevant if you don’t follow the best development practices. How to build a successful mental health app?

How to Build a Mental Health App in 5 Steps

Let’s jump straight into defining what it actually takes to build a mental wellness app.

Step 1: Understand Your Audience and Choose the Platform

Whether your app’s target audience is elderly people, teenagers or adults, having a clear and concise understanding of the audience is important, as it influences the choice of platforms. Also, it helps in comprehending more about your intended patients to craft relevant experiences when making a mental health app.

A handful of things to keep in mind during research include:

• Drafting a typical patient profile
• Identifying the customer age group that the app aims to help
• Carrying competitors research to define your audience research
• Underlining important mental health app features to address users pain points

Ideally, a group of people can participate and help you narrow down on the UX/UI of the solution

Recommended Reading –  Top UX/UI Mistakes To Avoid for a Scalable App Development

Step 2: Outline Features and Run Rapid Prototyping

When it’s about developing an app from scratch, having a list of well-defined features of mental health apps lay’s the firm foundation. Next, is testing the app with a prototype that enables you to verify your app design ideas and also ensure the app will work as intended.

Developing a prototype not just saves 10 times the development cost but significantly reduces the development time. Notably, you get to test the water for your business idea that too with zero coding (the most expensive part of building a mental wellness app).

Also, remember that developers should collaborate at this step to validate the technical feasibility of the ready-to-use designs. As an alternative, you can choose a no-code approach with stock interface elements to put together a prototype for testing. In most cases, test users deploy the software of their mobile and review it.

Step 3: Code the App for Patients and Doctors

Coding the app usually consumes 70% of the complete development time. Thus, we suggest following the Agile principles and going through interim testing with every iteration. Adhere these steps to guarantee a promised timely delivery:

• Use off-the-shelf components, like a chat with audio messages, to accelerate the project delivery.
• Utilize third-party HIPAA-compliant audio/video calling SDKs, if you are planning to integrate this feature that mental health app should have.
• Follow cybersecurity best practices according to HIPAA compliance.
• Setup the DevOps pipeline to allow developers to invest their time on more important things.

At Apptunix, we always strive to minimize the tech barrier (and cost accordingly) by utilizing available elements. In our years of experience, we’ve gathered a fine array of ready-to-use libraries for scheduling, messaging, authentication and many other prerequisite features that are common for most applications.

Step 4: Test! Test! Test

As we already know, app  testing is an intrinsic aspect of the development process. Although, this step describes a significant testing effort taking place right before launching the app. You’d need to go through things like:

• Stress testing
• Functional testing
• Security testing
• Unit testing
• Performance testing
• Interface testing
• Unit testing
• Compatibility testing

Step 5: Roll-Out and Keep Updating

Finally, all the important features of a mental health app are thoroughly tested, and are ready to welcome users.

A round of app store submission tremors and the app is finally rolled-out, probably accompanied with a mobile marketing campaign. Now, the time is about tracking the performance with the in-app analytics tool you established during development, addressing users’ pain-points, resolving concerns, and keeping the status quo updated. Also, set up a robust DevOps strategy to keep maintenance costs down.

Once launched in respective app stores, the app will provide you user engagement data, provided that you integrated Google Analytics or similar service in the development phase. Gathering this data will further drive software updates by helping you identify new opportunities.

💡 Following these steps with user-friendly mental health app features make sure your app stands out in the competitive market.

At the Last… Health is Wealth

Today, the digital mental wellness market is one of the most significant segments bracing society.

Therefore, striking a balance between essential features of mental health apps  and user-friendly design is crucial in building a successful app. Choosing the right category for your wellness software and thoroughly understanding your audience are key steps in the process.

So, if you have an idea to help people with their mental health struggles, now is the time to bring it to life. Contact the industry experts at Apptunix to healthcare app development that could be a lifesaver for your customers. We excel in creating impactful mental wellness apps. Partner with us to build an app that makes a real difference.