Five Pomodoro apps, two thousand reviews, one complaint
We read the recent review record for the five biggest Pomodoro and study timer apps on Google Play. One complaint appears in every one of them, and in one app it is nearly half of everything people complain about.
In this piece
We build a Pomodoro app, so this comparison is not neutral and we are saying so before the first number. StudyPomo is ours. It is free, it is on Play, and it exists because of the complaint this page is about. Read everything below knowing that.
What follows is not an opinion about which app is best. It is the review record, counted.
What we read
On 24 August 2026 we pulled the 400 most recent Google Play reviews for each of the five largest Pomodoro and study timer apps, in English, from the US store, sorted newest rather than by Play’s default relevance so the window is reproducible.
| App | Installs | Rating | 1 and 2 star, with text | Developer replies, of 400 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus To-Do | 10,000,000+ | 4.63 of 284,243 | 63 of 400 | 0 |
| Forest | 10,000,000+ | 4.35 of 811,680 | 86 of 400 | 374 |
| Pomodoro Timer | 5,000,000+ | 4.65 of 169,328 | 27 of 400 | 0 |
| Goodtime | 1,000,000+ | 4.62 of 22,103 | 35 of 400 | 272 |
| Flipd | 1,000,000+ | 3.09 of 6,131 | 177 of 400 | 66 |
Two thousand reviews. In all five apps, every 1 and 2 star review in the window carried text, so nobody is being counted who only left a star.
One thing to note before the complaint itself. Three of these apps needed about three months to produce 400 reviews. Goodtime needed eighteen months. Flipd needed five years, from July 2021 to August 2026. An app with over a million installs producing reviews that slowly is an app people have stopped arriving at.
The complaint that is in all five
Of the 388 negative reviews carrying text, 38 say the timer did not survive the phone: the session or its alarm failed when the screen went off, when the app went to the background, when it was swiped out of recents, or when the phone was left alone long enough to doze.
| App | Reviews saying this | Share of its negatives |
|---|---|---|
| Pomodoro Timer | 12 of 27 | 44.4% |
| Goodtime | 7 of 35 | 20.0% |
| Focus To-Do | 5 of 63 | 7.9% |
| Forest | 5 of 86 | 5.8% |
| Flipd | 9 of 177 | 5.1% |
Four developers. Five separate codebases. Free apps, subscription apps and one-time-purchase apps. Open source and closed. The same failure in all of them.
We counted this narrowly. A review had to describe the mechanism or state plainly that the alarm did not fire. General complaints of “buggy”, crashes with no stated cause, and battery complaints were left out. Every one of the 38 was read individually rather than matched on a keyword.
The tell is a countdown that goes negative
Here is the part we would not have understood a year ago.
Among the complaints, a specific symptom keeps recurring. Not “the alarm was late”. The timer reaches zero and then keeps going, downwards, into negative numbers, and cannot be stopped.
From Pomodoro Timer, version 1.42.0:
after the timer ends, there is no bell and it just goes into negative seconds
And, the same week:
Amazing app 99% of the time. Really clean UI, no ads, great when it works. Unfortunately it does this thing where an interval ends and it starts counting negative time. You can’t pause it or reset it, you either wait for it to miraculously end the interval or kill the process through settings. Moving on, sadly.
We shipped that exact bug. An early build of StudyPomo 1.0.0 drew its notification as a live chronometer, and when a session ended while the app’s process was dead, the chronometer kept counting past zero. We wrote about the fix when StudyPomo launched.
So we can say what the symptom means, because we caused it and then had to diagnose it. A countdown running into negative numbers is not a bug in the countdown. It is proof that nothing was ever scheduled to end the session. The app was counting towards a moment rather than handing that moment to the system in advance, so when the process was reclaimed there was nothing left holding the appointment. The number on screen keeps moving because a chronometer is just subtracting from a start time, and it has no idea the thing it belonged to is gone.
That is why the reviewer cannot pause or reset it. There is nothing running to receive the tap.
The other reports describe the same failure earlier in its life. From the same app:
accepted permission request to show notification. locked the screen to save battery. checked once or twice to see how much time remaining. then forgot about it. stuck at 8 mins for an 1 hr.
From Goodtime:
stop working when screen is off
From Focus To-Do, where the user had already granted the exemption that is supposed to prevent this:
app was perfectly run however the app don’t count after last update although I make app run in background and unrestricted power usage
The one that stands out
Pomodoro Timer by Appfx.eu, five million installs, rated 4.65 from 169,328 ratings.
By every aggregate it is the healthiest app in the table. It has the highest rating, and it draws the fewest complaints of any of the five: 27 negative reviews with text out of 400, under seven per cent.
And 12 of those 27, nearly half, are this one defect.
Eleven of the twelve name version 1.42.0. The twelfth carries no version. 1.42.0 is the current build, and 354 of the 400 reviews we read sit on it. This is not an old problem that got fixed. It is the app as it ships today.
The UI is great, however there seems to be an issue - the timer doesn’t ring, it just quietly “doesn’t” let you know that the time is up. Must be some glitch, but seems to be unusable at current state. Wish it worked, really loved how the app looks!
Doesnt ring even if everything is enabled. I have to check once in a while, so whats th point!
The developer has replied to none of the 400 reviews.
What is genuinely hard here, and what is not
We want to be fair about which half of this is difficult, because we have been on the wrong end of it.
Keeping a countdown alive on Android is genuinely hard. An app that is not on screen has no guarantee it will keep running. Manufacturer firmware makes it worse, and on Transsion phones, the Tecno and Infinix handsets that are ordinary here in Nigeria, we measured a foreground service being killed outright even with a battery exemption granted. There is no application-level fix for that. We looked. Anyone building in this category will hit the same wall, and Focus To-Do points users at the manufacturer’s own settings for exactly this reason.
One reviewer of Flipd documented the version of this that is nobody’s fault at all:
In oneUI 5, Samsung introduced “check background activity” which helps to see apps running in the background permission & stop them if necessary in one click. It can be accessed right above the recent page in the recent apps screen so when I use Focus lock, I can easily access the “check background activity” and stop flipd running in the background. I love flipd, but this bug/ loophole defeats whole purpose of app.
That is a focus app defeated by an operating system feature, and there is not much Flipd could have done.
Replying is not hard. Two of the five apps in this table answer their reviewers: Forest replied to 374 of 400, Goodtime to 272. Focus To-Do and Pomodoro Timer replied to none. A user who says the timer never rang, on the current build, and hears nothing back, has no way to know whether anyone read it.
That is the part we would not defend. The engineering is hard. Reading is not.
What we are not claiming
We have not reproduced any of these bugs ourselves. This is the review record, not a test report, and a review is a description written by someone frustrated rather than a diagnosis.
We read one locale. English, US store. The Hindi and Arabic reviews in the Focus To-Do corpus were left out of the counts because we could not classify them honestly.
Play limits how far back the reviews go, so this is a recent window and not a history. We cannot tell you what share of the five million people using Pomodoro Timer hit this, only that of those who wrote something negative recently, nearly half wrote about this.
And StudyPomo is not immune to the hard half of the problem. On Transsion firmware our timer dies too, and we have said so in public, because we could not fix it.
If you are choosing one
Set a session, lock the phone, and put it in another room for the full length of it. Do not check it. That single test is the one the reviews above are all describing, and it takes one session to run.
If the app comes back showing negative numbers, the countdown was never scheduled, and it will do it again.
Written by Adeboye Oluwatimileyin and Moses-Azuoru George, the two people who are Emberfig. We make money from AdMob inside the apps. This site carries no ads yet. You never pay us and we never sell your data.