Pomodoro prompt — copy, paste, build

A vague timer prompt produces a stopwatch. A 25-minute countdown, a start button, maybe a beep. Useful for ten minutes, then deleted — because the App Store has fifty of those and Apple's built-in Clock does the same thing for free.

This prompt is opinionated on the parts of the focus loop that actually keep someone in a session. The daily goal ring on the home screen turns a single tomato into a streak the user wants to protect. The auto-transition between focus and break with a soft chime plus haptic removes the cognitive cost of restarting — the moment a user has to tap "next" between intervals, half of them quit and check Slack instead.

Session history matters more than founders think. Looking down at "you focused 3h 20m today, that's a personal best" is what makes the app feel like a coach instead of a kitchen timer. Without it, the app is dead by week two regardless of how clean the timer animation is.

The detail that flips "tolerated" to "opened" is notification reliability. End-of-interval chimes that fire silently because the user backgrounded the app are the single biggest one-star review category for pomodoro apps on the App Store. The prompt wires Expo Notifications at start time, not on a JS interval — that one architectural choice is worth a half-star rating bump.

Three traps that turn a strong pomodoro brief into a forgettable app.

Over-configuring the cycle. Founders see Forest, Be Focused, Focus Keeper and try to ship every option on day one — five custom interval profiles, a long-break-after-N picker, a per-day schedule, a per-project override. The result is a settings screen that takes three minutes to understand and a home screen that feels heavy. Ship the 25/5 default, expose four sliders in a settings sheet, and stop. Anyone who wants more granularity will tell you in the App Store review.

Trying to compete with Apple Focus modes. The platform already does Do Not Disturb, contact allow-lists, and home screen filtering during focus. A third-party app that re-implements DND badly will lose. Lean into what Focus modes don't do: history, streaks, the visual ritual of starting a session, ambient audio. The Pro variant of this prompt does exactly that.

Skipping the foreground re-sync. Founders count down on a JS setInterval and the timer drifts every time the app suspends. By minute 23 the UI says 1:47 left and the notification fires at 0:00 according to wall-clock — and the user gets confused and stops trusting the app. Schedule the notification at session start, store the original start timestamp, and re-derive the displayed countdown from "now minus startedAt" on every foreground.

Three knobs that turn this generic pomodoro prompt into a differentiated product.

Pick a sound and motion language. The chime that plays at end-of-focus is the brand. A crisp digital ping says "productivity tool"; a soft bowl says "meditation-adjacent"; a single piano note says "premium". Add a paragraph to your prompt describing the audio character — "warm analog, no digital beeps, one-shot at end-of-interval, no looping" — and AppGenie will pick free assets that match and wire them with Expo AV.

Decide on the work-tracking unit. The Lite variant is a session counter, anonymous. The Pro variant adds a task tag per session for time-on-project tracking. If your audience is solo students, the Lite shape is enough; if you are pitching freelancers and consultants, the per-tag breakdown is the feature they buy on. Add "with per-session tag and a weekly per-tag bar chart" to the prompt and the stats screen reshapes accordingly.

Choose a calendar story. AsyncStorage on-device only is fine for a personal-use app. If you want sessions to show up as 25-minute blocks on the user's actual calendar, add "with expo-calendar write integration that posts a 'Focus' event at session start" — AppGenie wires the permission flow and the event template. That single integration is what makes a pomodoro app feel real to a knowledge worker who lives in their calendar.