Health and fitness apps have become one of the more widely adopted tools in consumer wellness. According to the European Society of Medicine, health apps have been downloaded 1.7 billion times globally as of 2025, a figure that reflects genuine consumer demand for accessible weight management support. Yet download volume alone does not reveal much about outcomes. Research from the Journal of Medical Internet Research suggests 70% of users stop engaging with health and fitness apps within the first 100 days.
That difference between adoption and sustained engagement has become one of the more studied questions in digital health research, and it points to a broader conversation about what different program models are actually built to do.
