Pomodoro Timer App — Free Focus Timer for Studying

Before you start, the timer is in one of three modes — and switching modes clears your current selection, so you can't accidentally carry a study-mode chapter into a revision session.

Study

Normal first-pass learning. Requires you to pick a subject and a chapter. The time is logged against that chapter in your syllabus.

Revision

Revising material you've already covered. Also requires a subject and chapter, but logs against your revision track instead, and stamps the session with which revision cycle was active on that subject at the moment you pressed start. That cycle number is captured once at the beginning — so if the subject rolls over to the next cycle mid-session, the time still belongs to the cycle you actually studied in.

Miscellaneous

The deliberate odd one out. No subject, no chapter, nothing to select — you can just press start. Instead you can type a free-text label ("Mock test", "Physics + Chem mixed"). This exists for the days you work across several subjects at once, where the honest answer is "this doesn't belong to one chapter."

Misc time counts toward your day totals, your streak, and your daily goal — but it is deliberately never attributed to any subject or chapter, so it can't inflate one subject's numbers.

Session goal

How long you intend this sitting to last. Quick chips for 25, 45, and 60 minutes, plus a custom value — or none at all for an open-ended session. This drives the fill level of the timer visual and triggers a completion alert when you reach it.

Pomodoro intervals

A focus length and a break length. Turn these on and the timer automatically flips between focus and break: when your focus interval elapses it banks that focus time, switches to break, and starts the break clock; when the break elapses it flips back to focus. It keeps cycling for as long as the session runs — no cycle limit, no "long break every fourth round." It's a straightforward alternation you configure yourself.

Only focus time is counted. Break time is tracked so the app knows when to switch you back, but it never accumulates into the session total. A 25/5 session run for an hour banks the focus minutes, not the breaks.

Alert controls

You get separate control over the alert when you hit your session goal and the alert when an interval flips — each has its own on/off for sound and vibration, its own tone, and its own volume. On Android these fire as real OS alarms scheduled in advance, so they still go off with the app closed or the screen locked.

The timer is wall-clock based, not tick-based. It records when you started and works out elapsed time from real time — which means it keeps counting correctly while your phone is locked, while you're in another app, or after the OS has killed the app entirely.

On Android there's a chronometer notification the system itself ticks — counting down to the end of your current interval when Pomodoro is on, counting up otherwise — at essentially zero battery cost.

The 2-hour cap

That design has one failure mode, and it's handled explicitly. A session nobody ever stops would otherwise accrue forever — close the app on one device, finish studying on another, come back the next evening and find a timer sitting at 26 hours. So the app credits at most 2 hours of time for a period it wasn't running. Past that it has no evidence anyone was still studying: it recovers the session as paused, tells you how much untracked time was dropped, and lets you decide whether to save it or discard it entirely. Banking hours the app can't vouch for would corrupt your history far worse than dropping them does.

Watchdog and heartbeat

There's also a watchdog that detects a stalled timer and restarts it, and a heartbeat every five minutes that records the session is still alive.

When you stop, one of two things happens:

• Under 1 minute — nothing is saved. The session is discarded silently. This stops your history filling with 4-second accidental taps.
• 1 minute or more — a session is written, permanently, with its start time, end time, duration, subject, chapter, mode, revision cycle (if any), and your misc note (if any).

Saving a session is treated as a deliberate act, so it's pushed to the cloud immediately rather than waiting on the usual debounce — because stopping a timer is very often the last thing you do before closing the app.

One stop triggers all of this:

1. Chapter auto-promotion

A study session promotes that chapter from Not started to In progress in your syllabus, automatically. A revision session does the same on that chapter's revision status, and also marks the subject's revision as active. Both only ever move a chapter forward from Not started — they never overwrite a status you set yourself.

2. Per-chapter time

The session adds to that chapter's total focus time, which appears on the chapter's own card next to its progress. Study time, revision time, and time per revision cycle can all be read separately.

3. Day total, streak, and daily goal

The day's total is every session that started today plus whatever the live timer is currently at, so the number moves in real time as you study rather than jumping when you stop.

4. Home-screen widgets

Streak data is recomputed and pushed out to your widgets on every save.

Your daily goal is a minutes-per-day target from your profile. The timer's outer ring fills toward it as the day goes on, and when you cross it you get confetti — once per day, and it re-arms if the total ever drops back below.

The streak is computed by walking back through the last 365 days and asking, for each one, whether you met that day's goal:

• Today never breaks your streak. If you haven't hit today's goal yet, the streak holds — it's still in progress, not failed.
• A missed past day freezes the current streak and starts the count again from there.

You get a current streak, a longest streak, and a total count of goal days.

Recovery days

You nominate one weekday as a recovery day with its own lower goal — and if you set that goal to zero minutes, that day counts as met automatically, every week, without studying at all. This lets you keep a genuine rest day without it costing you a 90-day streak.

It only applies from the date you actually enabled it, so it can't retroactively repair streaks you already broke — and if you later switch it off it stops applying from that date forward.

Tapping into full-screen focus mode gives you an immersive, distraction-free view with the system UI hidden and the screen kept awake while the timer runs.

Atmospheres — the background

There are two kinds:

• Still atmospheres: Zen Black, Rainy Day, Rainy Night, Library, Forest, Sikkim, Shimla.
• Live atmospheres (animated): Night Fireflies, Underwater Reef, Night Campfire, Deep Galaxy, Winter Snowfall, Cozy Rain, Autumn Wind, Cherry Blossom, Synthwave City.

Several live atmospheres carry matching ambient sound — rain on a window, fire crackling, winter wind, rustling leaves, a Japanese zen garden, bubbles, a space drone, a synthwave hum — which loops while the atmosphere is active.

Night Fireflies and Underwater Reef are free. The rest are part of lifetime premium.

Focus vs. break atmospheres

You can set a different atmosphere for focus and for break — picking one asks which of the two you want to apply it to — so the screen visibly changes character when you switch between working and resting. There's also an optional blur.

Progress styles

How the timer itself is drawn, independent of the background. Six options: Liquid Wave (the default), Minimal Ring, Sleek Bar, Sci-Fi HUD, Meteor Trail, and Morphing Blob.

OLED protection and smart pausing

On dark atmospheres, the whole display is nudged by a small random offset once a minute, so a two-hour session can't burn a static timer into an OLED panel. The wave animation also stops entirely when the timer is paused — no GPU cycles wasted on a screen nobody's watching.

Milestone celebrations

Fire at 15 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 1½ hours, 2, 3, 4 and 5 hours within a single session.

The analysis screen reads your saved sessions directly, with a Today / Overall switch and an All / Study / Revision filter across the top. (There's deliberately no Misc filter — misc sessions carry no subject breakdown to chart, so they roll up under All.) For a full breakdown of every analytics screen, see the Focus Analytics feature page.

From your sessions it builds:

• Total time, session count, and your top subject.
• A per-subject breakdown, sorted by time descending, each expandable into a per-chapter breakdown.
• A daily study graph over time.
• A timeline strip bucketing your minutes by hour of day — which is how you find out when you actually study best.

Sessions in the history screen can be edited — you can correct a session's hours and minutes if you left the timer running or forgot to start it — or deleted outright. Every edit recomputes your streak data immediately.

The Diya dashboard takes the same sessions and computes a 7-day consistency score and a 7-day study strip that stacks focus time and revision time per day against that day's goal — both using the identical window, so the two cards can never disagree about how your week went.

The Focus tab shows today's plan blocks right under the timer. Tapping one loads its subject and chapter straight into the timer, so going from "here's what I'm supposed to do now" to "I'm doing it" is one tap, with no manual re-selection.

The working link is one-directional: the planner hands the timer your subject and chapter, and the session logs against that chapter's syllabus progress. The planner's time-estimate calibration field exists in the data model but isn't currently written to — ticking a block off records it as done without an actual-minutes figure, so estimates stand in for reporting.

Sessions are immutable once written, but each carries its own timestamp so a multi-device merge can resolve two devices holding the same session without one arbitrarily winning. Sessions are encoded and decoded on a background thread, so a long history never stutters the UI.