Why I Built a Pomodoro App in 2026 (When There Are Already 400 of Them)

I didn't set out to build a Pomodoro app. I set out to build the one I wanted to use.

That probably sounds like a cliché. Every indie developer says it. But the thing is, I'd actually tried to avoid building this. I spent months cycling through existing Pomodoro apps — Forest, Focus To-Do, Session, Be Focused, Pomofocus, a half-dozen others — hoping one of them would just work the way my brain needed it to. None of them did. Not because they were bad apps. Because they all made the same mistake.

The problem with every Pomodoro app

Search "best Pomodoro app" and you'll find listicles comparing fifteen options. They all have the same features: a timer, some kind of task list, maybe ambient sounds or a growing virtual tree. The reviews read like a checklist. Does it have stats? Check. Integrations? Check. Customizable durations? Check.

But here's what none of those reviews mention: what happens when you open the app?

In almost every Pomodoro app I tried, opening the app dropped me into a task list, a dashboard, or a settings screen. The timer — the thing I was there for — was buried. Sometimes it was a tab. Sometimes it was behind a "start session" button that first wanted me to pick a project, a tag, and a duration. Sometimes I had to scroll past a motivational quote to find it.

This is a small friction. Maybe two or three seconds. But those two or three seconds are exactly where procrastination lives. The moment between "I should start working" and actually starting is the most fragile moment in the entire Pomodoro workflow. Every tap, every screen, every decision you add to that moment is a chance for your brain to say "actually, let me check email first."

I kept running into this and thinking: the whole point of the Pomodoro Technique is that you set a timer and start. Why does every app make you do six things before you get to the timer?

The insight that started FocusFlow

The answer, once I saw it, felt obvious: the timer should be the home screen.

Not a feature. Not a tab. The entire home screen. You open the app, you see a countdown, you press start. One tap from a cold launch to a running focus session. Everything else — tasks, stats, settings — exists behind the timer, available when you want it, invisible when you don't.

I started calling this "timer-first design," and it became the guiding principle for every decision I made building FocusFlow. Every feature had to pass a single test: does this get between the user and the timer? If yes, it either moves or it gets cut.

This sounds simple, and it is. That's the point. The Pomodoro Technique works because of its simplicity. An app built around the technique should honor that same simplicity instead of burying it under features.

Constraints are features

There's a design philosophy that shaped everything about FocusFlow, and it's counterintuitive: constraints make things better, not worse.

When you open FocusFlow, you can only work on one task at a time. You can assign a task to the timer, but you can't see your entire task list sprawling across the screen while you're supposed to be focusing. That's not a missing feature. That's the feature. The technique works because it forces you to commit to a single thing. The app should enforce the same commitment.

When you mark a task as your Daily Frog — your most important task for the day — it floats to the top of every list. You can't sort it away. You can't scroll past it. It's there, staring at you, until you either do it or deliberately remove it. That's not pushy design. That's the app doing what you asked it to do: making sure you eat the frog.

When the timer is running, the screen clears. The task pill shows what you're working on. The countdown runs. There's a distraction button if you need to log an interruption. That's it. No sidebar, no notification badges, no "you've been productive for 12 minutes!" cheerleading. The absence of those things is a decision, not an oversight.

The productivity app market has an addiction problem: every app wants to add features to justify its existence. One more integration. One more view. One more chart. But the Pomodoro Technique is inherently minimal. It's a timer and a commitment. An app that respects the technique should resist the urge to turn it into something it's not.

What I actually use it for

I want to be specific here, because I think the details matter more than the philosophy.

I'm a developer. My typical workday involves writing code, reviewing PRs, answering messages, planning sprints, and writing documentation. Some of that is deep work. Some of it is shallow. The Pomodoro Technique helps me treat them differently.

My morning routine: I open Todoist, where my tasks already live. FocusFlow syncs with Todoist both ways, so whatever I added last night or whatever got assigned to me overnight is already there. I pick the one task that would make the day feel successful even if nothing else got done, and I mark it as the Daily Frog. Then I estimate how many pomodoros each task should take. That planning — which takes maybe three minutes — changes everything about how the rest of the day feels. Instead of a vague list of things I should do, I have a concrete plan with a timer attached to each item.

Then I start. Open FocusFlow, see the timer, press start. Twenty-five minutes of focused coding with no tab-switching, no Slack checks, no "let me just quickly" anything. When a thought pops up — and thoughts always pop up — I tap the distraction button. That's it. The thought is logged. I deal with it later. The session continues.

When the timer rings, I write a quick note about what I accomplished. "Finished auth refactor, needs tests." Three seconds of reflection that, over time, builds a detailed record of what I actually did each day, not what I planned to do.

The break starts automatically. Five minutes. I stand up, refill my water, look out the window. Not at my phone. Then the next session starts, either automatically or with one tap.

That's the workflow. It's not complicated. It's not optimized within an inch of its life. It just works, every day, because the app gets out of the way fast enough that I actually use it.

What I chose not to build

The decisions about what to leave out were harder than the decisions about what to include. Here's what FocusFlow deliberately doesn't have:

No social features. No leaderboards, no shared streaks, no accountability partners. The moment you add social comparison to a focus tool, it becomes a social tool. Your motivation should come from your own data and your own goals, not from performing productivity for an audience.

No ambient sounds or music. Not because they're bad — some people love them — but because they're a different product. FocusFlow is a timer and a task tracker. If you want rain sounds, your phone already has a dozen apps for that. I'd rather do one thing well than five things okay.

No AI-powered suggestions. Not yet, anyway. The temptation to add "smart" features is real, but every AI feature that makes a suggestion is a feature that asks you to make a decision. And the golden rule for FocusFlow is that every feature must reduce the number of decisions you make, not increase them. If AI ever shows up in FocusFlow, it'll be to make decisions for you — not to present you with options.

No signup wall. You download the app. You press start. That's it. No account creation, no email verification, no "complete your profile" screen standing between you and your first focus session. Your data lives on your device. If you want to back it up, you can export everything to a file. But the default path has zero friction.

The real competition isn't other apps

Here's what I've come to believe after building this: FocusFlow's competition isn't Forest or Focus To-Do or any other Pomodoro app. The real competition is the moment of hesitation between "I should start working" and actually starting.

Every extra tap, every unnecessary screen, every "would you like to configure your session?" dialog is a gift to procrastination. The apps that win aren't the ones with the most features. They're the ones that get out of the way fastest.

That's why the timer is the home screen. That's why one tap starts a session. That's why constraints are features, not limitations.

I built FocusFlow because I needed it. It turns out I wasn't the only one.