Most productivity apps have a setup problem. Before you can track a single minute of work, you are creating an account, naming a workspace, picking notification preferences, and clicking through onboarding. By the time the timer finally starts, the focus you were trying to protect is already gone.
Flowtime is a direct answer to that. It is a minimal focus timer for iPhone and Android, built by Swiss indie software studio gugus. Software&Things. Its founder, Ava Thalheim, originally developed the app around her own experiences with time blindness and hyperfocus. No account, no cloud sync, no workspace configuration. Open it, press start, work. Everything stays on your device.
Why It Exists
Ava originally built Flowtime for herself before anyone else. Her ADHD and her own experiences with time blindness and hyperfocus influenced some of its earliest design decisions. Her stated frustration is a familiar one: she was spending more time configuring focus tools than using them. Accounts, subscriptions, sync, onboarding — all of it sitting between the intention to work and the act of working.
The more interesting half of her reasoning is what the app became. Flowtime started as a way to focus for longer, and turned into a way to stop on purpose. She describes starting a one-hour Flow Session, blocking her usual apps, and taking her dog for a walk — the running timer and the unavailable apps make it easier to actually be away from work instead of mentally still in it.
That inversion explains most of the design decisions below. Plenty of timers help you start. This one recognizes that sometimes stopping is the harder problem.
Four Focus Modes, Not One Method
Flowtime does not commit to a single rhythm. It ships with four ways to track a session:
- Classic Timer — straightforward count-up tracking. Start it and forget it.
- Pomodoro — configurable work and break intervals, with the standard 25/5 pattern on the free tier.
- Flowmodoro — work until focus fades, then take a break scaled to how long you actually focused.
- Flow Session — set a target duration, receive check-in reminders while you work, and decide for yourself when to stop.
The distinction that matters here is between Pomodoro and Flow Session. A fixed 25-minute interval is useful when starting is hard and useless when it cuts across your best twenty minutes of the day. Flowtime supports both and lets you pick per session rather than committing to a philosophy.
Focus Reminders: Making Time Visible
One of Flowtime’s more distinctive features is built around a simple problem: it is easy to lose track of time when you are deeply focused.
During an active session, Flowtime surfaces periodic check-ins. They are not alarms and they do not end the session. They exist to make elapsed time noticeable at a moment when you may have stopped noticing it, and to prompt a question: am I still on the task I started, and do I need a break?
For anyone who has looked up from work to find three hours gone, the value of an external time cue is obvious. It can be the difference between a focus session that ends when you intended and one that ends when you run out of afternoon. Reminder intervals are configurable, with additional customization available through Pro.
App Blocking You Are Allowed to Override
Flowtime can make selected apps unavailable during a focus session. You choose which ones in advance, so the decision is made while you are thinking clearly rather than mid-scroll.
Worth noting: it is not a hard lockout. If you genuinely need a blocked app, you can override the block. That sounds like a weakness and mostly is not. The point is not to build a wall — it is to interrupt the automatic reach for a familiar icon and insert a beat of awareness between impulse and action. For habitual phone-checking, that beat is often the whole fix. For deliberate avoidance, it will not save you, and it is not designed to.
App blocking is available with Pro.
Local-First History and Reports
Sessions are stored on your device. No servers, no account, nothing to opt out of.
You can review time by project, timer mode, or a custom date range, with visual breakdowns rather than the dashboard sprawl built for managers reviewing a team. The reports are personal by design and read that way. Deeper analytics and break tracking are Pro features.
What a Session Actually Looks Like
Open the app and pick a mode. The timer is the first screen. There is no login, no welcome tour, no empty-state prompt asking you to create your first workspace.
Assign a project, or skip it. If you want to see where your time goes across different areas of work, tag the session. If you just want to start, start. The free tier supports two projects.
Work, with check-ins running. Elapsed time stays visible and reminders arrive at your configured interval. Each one is a decision point rather than an interruption: keep going, switch, or stop.
Review afterwards. The session lands in your local history. Open Reports to see the breakdown by project, mode, or date range.
The whole loop is four taps and one decision. That is the product.
Free vs Pro
The free tier is usable on its own: the standard timer with standard notifications, Pomodoro with fixed intervals, one project, and one day of history. It covers the basic Flowtime experience without requiring a subscription just to start tracking focus.
Pro is aimed at people who want more flexibility. It unlocks Flowmodoro, Quick Start templates, custom notification patterns and reminder profiles, UI customization including accent colors, statistics filters, and custom timer setups.
The distinction fits Flowtime’s broader philosophy: the basic timer stays simple, while Pro is largely about adapting the experience to the way you prefer to focus.
Where It Holds Back
Local-first is a real privacy win with a real cost attached. There is currently no cloud sync, so Flowtime does not offer the seamless cross-device experience of an account-based productivity platform. That is the trade, and it is worth understanding if cross-device access is important to you.
The free project cap of one is tight. Anyone tracking several areas of work will meet the Pro wall quickly — reasonable for an indie app to charge for, but plan for it rather than being surprised by it.
There is no desktop or web app. For desk work, that means your tracker lives on the phone sitting next to the keyboard, which is a slightly odd fit for an app whose other job is keeping you off your phone.
And the obvious caveat, which the developer states plainly herself: this is not a medical or diagnostic tool and not a treatment for ADHD. ADHD influenced its origins, but Flowtime is ultimately a general-purpose focus timer built around reducing friction and making time more visible.
Who It’s For
Flowtime suits anyone who finds mainstream productivity apps too heavy for personal use. People dealing with time blindness or hyperfocus may recognize some of the problems that originally shaped the app, but its approach is equally applicable to students, writers, developers, and anyone who wants a private, account-free timer that gets out of the way. If you already run a task manager and only need something to keep your focus sessions honest, it slots in without asking you to rebuild your system.
If you want cross-device sync, team reporting, or a desktop client, this is not that app and does not pretend to be.
Flowtime is available on the App Store and Google Play, in ten languages, with a free tier that covers the core focus experience.
