Behind Pomoly: building a focus timer that doesn't nag
Pomoly is our take on the Pomodoro technique - 25-minute focus sessions, 5-minute breaks, a calm interface that gets out of your way. There are 200+ Pomodoro apps on the App Store. Here's why we built another one and what we changed.
Why another Pomodoro app
Every Pomodoro app we tried had the same problem: it tried to be your productivity coach. Streaks, achievements, daily goals, weekly reports. The gamification turned a 25-minute concentration tool into a guilt machine.
We wanted the opposite. A focus timer that runs while you work, shows your progress when you glance at your phone, and disappears when you don't need it. No streaks, no badges, no nagging.
The design constraints
Three rules that shaped Pomoly:
- Open the app, start a session in one tap. No menu navigation, no setup screens. Tap the big circle, focus for 25 minutes.
- Glanceable progress, not constant attention. Live Activity on the Lock Screen + a home-screen widget. Open the app at most once per session.
- Calm > clever. Default ambient sounds (rain, white noise, lo-fi). No earned content, no unlocks.
Live Activity + widget
The Live Activity shows session phase and time remaining. The Dynamic Island pause/play pill lets users control the session without unlocking. Update budget is fine - we tick at minute boundaries during focus, every second during the last minute.
The home-screen widget shows total focus time today, in a single number. We considered showing the active session in the widget too, but the Live Activity already does that better.
Read more on our approach to widgets in this earlier post.
Sound design
Pomoly ships with 12 ambient sound loops - rain, café, brown noise, lo-fi, ocean. We license them from a small audio library; the catalog is intentionally modest.
What we explicitly chose not to do: nature sounds with bird calls, music with vocals, anything with sudden volume changes. Those break focus instead of supporting it.
What we'd change
If we rebuilt Pomoly from scratch today: tighter integration with Apple's Focus modes. Right now starting a session optionally enables Do Not Disturb; we'd want it tied to a custom Focus profile that auto-launches when the user begins.
We'd also add an Apple Watch app. We've been resisting because the watchOS dev cost is steep for a single app, but the use case (start a session from your watch, glance during work) is clearly there.
Lessons
The hardest part of building a 'calm' app is resisting the feature list pressure. Every review asks for streaks, weekly goals, productivity scores. We've said no to all of it. The users who want gamification have 199 other Pomodoro apps to choose from.