Where the Android app stands today

The honest summary: the Android version has caught up. Not “mostly caught up with a few asterisks”. Caught up.

Every workout from the iOS app is on Android. Every exercise, from the beginner callouts to the advanced flowing combos, the pad work, the punching bag sessions, the HIIT, the kickboxing. Every program too, whether you are starting from zero with Boxing 101 or learning to jump rope from scratch.

The bigger features that were missing at launch have shipped one by one. Quick start arrived in June, so you can open the app, pick a duration and intensity, and get a generated session in seconds. The combo creator came with the same wave of updates, letting you build your own sequences out of punches, defenses, and movements. Goals, streaks, and training reminders followed, and now full stats are in: rounds over time, training calendar, progress charts, the whole picture of your work.

Custom sound effects are in too. If you want a different bell, different callout sounds, or a different feel to your rounds, you can change it, exactly like on iOS.

The small things matter just as much

A feature list only tells part of the story. What makes an app pleasant to train with every day is usually the stuff nobody puts on a comparison chart.

The coach pages are a good example. Every coach who appears in the app’s videos has a page with their background and their content. It is a small thing. Almost nobody would have complained if we had skipped it on Android. But the coaches are real people who know boxing, and the app feels more trustworthy when you can see who is teaching you. So we built it.

Same logic everywhere else: the technique catalogue has every tutorial video, the home screen recommendations adapt to your level and equipment, the profile settings carry the same options. When you tap around the Android app, we want it to feel finished, not like a port where every third screen says “coming soon”.

That is what “polish” means to us. The iOS version got its reputation from years of weekly updates and small fixes, and there was no version of this where Android users got a rougher deal. If the goal is to be the best Android boxing app, the bar is the iOS app, not the other Android apps.

Why we are doing this

The simple answer is that people kept asking.

For years, the most common message we received was some variation of “when is this coming to Android?”. It came from everywhere:

• People who heard about the app at their gym, from a training partner who uses it on iPhone, and then discovered they could not get it.
• People who switched from iPhone to Android and lost access to an app they trained with several times a week. Some of them told us the app was one of the things they missed most about their old phone, which is the kind of message that stays with you.
• People who found us on social media, watched the videos, wanted to try it, and hit a wall at the download step.

When you are a small independent team, you cannot do everything at once, and for a long time Android was the thing we could not do yet. But we never stopped hearing from Android users, and the sheer consistency of those requests is what made the decision for us. Nobody asks for years about an app they are lukewarm on.

So when we finally committed to Android, half-measures were off the table. Shipping a stripped-down version to people who waited that long would have been worse than not shipping at all. They did not ask for “a boxing app on Android”. They asked for this app on Android.

What “best” actually means here

“Best Android boxing app” is a big claim, so let us be concrete about what we are aiming for.

It means fully native. The app is built specifically for Android, not wrapped web pages. It opens fast, runs smoothly mid-round, and works offline once installed, whether you train in a basement gym with no signal or a garage where the WiFi gives up.

It means real training content. Hundreds of technique videos from real coaches, structured programs that take you from your first jab to long combinations, and workouts for shadow boxing, heavy bag, jump rope, and conditioning. Not a glorified timer with a logo on it.

It means no engagement tricks. No ads, no manipulative notifications, no dark patterns around the subscription. There is a real free tier, and the paid tier unlocks the rest. We have also written before about where we stand on AI-generated content: the coaching in the app comes from people who box.

And it means continuing to ship. The Android app went from missing five major features to full parity in a matter of weeks because we treat it as a first-class platform. Future features will land on both platforms, not on iOS first with Android trailing behind by a year.

If you have been waiting

If you are one of the people who asked for the Android version, at the gym, by email, in a comment somewhere: thank you, and this update wave is for you. The app you heard about is now the app you can actually install.

And if you try it and something feels off, tell us at shadowboxingworkout@gmail.com or through the contact page. The iOS app became what it is because users kept pointing out what to fix. The fastest way for the Android version to earn the title of best Android boxing app is for Android users to hold us to it.

You can get the Shadow Boxing App on the Play Store, free to download, with a real amount of training available before paying anything.

This short clip is heavy bag work focused on body hooks: dropping the level, turning the hip into the shot, and digging a hook into the ribs instead of always aiming up top. Landing it on a bag teaches you how much you have to bend your knees and rotate to get real weight behind the shot, something that’s easy to fake in the air. It’s the kind of thing the app mixes into workouts so it doesn’t slip out of your rotation.

If you want to add body work to your own training, you can do it for free. Download the app, pick a bag session or a shadow boxing round, and start throwing to the body as well as the head. No signup hurdle, just start punching.

Train around the heat, not through it

The biggest mistake people make in summer is trying to do the exact same session they did in January, at the same time of day, and then feeling defeated when they gas out after two rounds. Heat is real. Your heart rate runs higher, you sweat out fluid faster, and a session that felt moderate in cooler weather can turn into a slog.

The fix is mostly about timing and intensity. Train early in the morning or later in the evening when the temperature drops, and don’t be shy about pulling back the effort a notch. A 20 minute session at a controlled pace beats a 45 minute one that leaves you dizzy. In the Shadow Boxing App you can set the intensity before a workout starts, so you’re not guessing. If you want to understand how that lever actually works, I wrote a whole piece on dialing in your workout intensity that’s worth a read before summer really kicks in.

Shorter, sharper HIIT rounds also work well in the heat because you get real work done without spending an hour in a hot room. The 20 Minutes HIIT session is a good template for this: enough to get your heart going, short enough that you’ll actually do it.

Hydrate more than you think you need to, and keep a towel and water within reach. None of this is complicated, it just needs to be deliberate.

Most of all, listen to your body. If it’s just too hot out, there’s no shame in cutting a session short or skipping it entirely and coming back when it cools down. Dizziness, nausea, a pounding headache, or a heart rate that won’t settle are signs to stop, not to push through. Heat illness is not something to tough out. If you’re on medication, have a heart condition, or just aren’t sure whether hard training in the heat is safe for you, check with a doctor before you go all out. No workout is worth a trip to the emergency room.

The motivation problem

Let’s be honest about why summer training dies. It’s rarely the heat by itself. It’s that the structure of your week falls apart. No fixed gym time, friends visiting, long evenings that pull you toward doing anything other than punching the air in your living room.

The trick is to lower the barrier to starting. When you don’t feel like planning a session, the last thing you want is to scroll through a list of workouts deciding what to do. This is exactly what the Quick Start feature is for: pick a duration and an intensity, and it builds a workout for you on the spot, different every time. Deciding is the hard part, and Quick Start removes it. I dug into how it works in this write-up on quick start workouts if you want the details.

The other thing that helps is keeping a streak going, even a small one. The Shadow Boxing App tracks your streak on the progress screen, and once you have a few weeks stacked up, that number becomes its own reason to train. On the evening you’re tired and tempted to skip, “I don’t want to break my streak” is often enough to get you through a short session you’ll be glad you did. It’s a small psychological trick, but it works, and it’s exactly the kind of nudge summer training needs when nothing else is holding your schedule together.

Set the bar low enough that you can actually keep it. Three short sessions a week through July is worth more than a heroic two week block that burns out and leaves you doing nothing until September. A streak you can protect on your worst week is a streak that survives the whole summer.

Travel without losing your rhythm

This is where boxing really pulls ahead of most other training. Shadow boxing needs no equipment, no space to speak of, and no partner. A hotel room, a balcony, a patch of grass in a park, all of it works. You don’t need a bag, you don’t need gloves, you just need a few square feet and something to do.

The one thing that trips people up while traveling is connectivity. Spotty hotel wifi or no data abroad can kill an app that streams everything. The Shadow Boxing App works fully offline once it’s downloaded, so you can train in a cabin with no signal, in an apartment with dead wifi, or in a country where you refuse to pay for roaming. I covered this in detail in the guide on using a boxing app while traveling, and it’s the reason a lot of people keep the app on their phone specifically for trips.

A jump rope is the single best thing you can pack for summer. It weighs almost nothing, folds into a corner of a bag, and turns any bit of flat ground into a full cardio session. That last point matters more than people realize when they travel. You won’t always have somewhere safe or pleasant to go running, whether that’s an unfamiliar city, a highway-lined resort, or a heat index that makes a 5 mile run a bad idea. A rope solves all of that. You can get your heart rate up in a few square feet on a balcony or in a parking lot, and it carries over to your footwork in a way jogging never will. I compared the two directly in this piece on jump rope versus running for boxing cardio if you’re weighing which to lean on.

If you’ve never taken skipping seriously, summer is a good time to fix that, and the app has structured jump rope programs to get you there. The learn to jump rope program walks you from the basic bounce through the boxer skip and beyond, one lesson at a time, so you’re not just flailing a rope around hoping it clicks. It’s laid out in the guide to the jump rope program, and it’s the kind of skill you can build in a hotel room over a couple of weeks.

Between shadow boxing and a rope, you can keep a real boxing routine going anywhere in the world without touching a gym.

Come out of summer ahead

The people who keep training through summer, even at half volume, come back in the fall miles ahead of the ones who stopped and have to rebuild. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to keep the habit alive: a few short sessions a week, adjusted for the heat, done wherever you happen to be. Do that, and summer stops being the season your boxing falls apart and becomes the season you quietly get better while everyone else takes three months off.

You start with the jab-cross you already know, then the step back gets added so you slide out of range right after landing the cross, and finally the second 2 comes in as you step back into range. By the time the full sequence is called out, each piece already feels familiar, so the whole thing flows instead of falling apart mid-combo.

This build-up style of learning runs through the whole app, from beginner combos to longer sequences mixing punches, defenses, and footwork. The app is free to try, so grab it and see how quickly a combo like this one sticks.

Where AI helps us

We are a small independent team, and building the Shadow Boxing App for both iPhone and Android is a lot of work. AI speeds up the development process: it helps us write code, check our copy, track down bugs, helps with translations and build internal tools faster than we could on our own. That means features ship sooner and problems get fixed quicker, which is a win for everyone using the app.

The coach voice you hear during workouts is also generated with AI. Recording every combo, exercise name, and instruction in every language the app supports would be impossible for a team our size, and generated speech keeps the callouts clear, consistent and customisable. What the voice says, though, and when it says it, comes from the humans designing the workouts.

That is the extent of it. AI writes some of our code and lends the coach its voice. It does not design your training.

Why the workouts stay human

A language model can produce something that reads like a boxing workout. It will have rounds, combos, rest periods, and it will look plausible on paper. What it cannot do is feel that a combination falls apart when you throw it at speed, or that the recovery round comes one round too late, or that a callout arrives before you have reset your stance. Those things only show up when a real person is sweating through the session.

So we work with boxing coaches and real boxers to figure out what belongs in each workout. Coaches know where beginners get stuck because they watch it happen in the gym every week. We have written before about why having real coaches behind the app matters; the short version is that the difference shows up in every small detail, from how a program progresses to how long the rest between combos should be.

Before a workout makes it into the app, we run it with real people. We watch where they fall behind, which cues confuse them, and whether the intensity matches the level on the label. Then we adjust and test again. It is slower than generating content with a prompt, and the result is better for it.

One nuance worth spelling out: the app does generate workouts, in features like Quick Start. But that generation assembles exercises that coaches designed and we tested with real people, using logic we wrote ourselves. No model is improvising your rounds. Every building block was proved by a human before the app was allowed to combine it, and even the algorithm doing the combining was created by a human and reviewed many times to make sure everything it produces makes sense.

Humans in front of the camera, humans behind it

All the tutorial and demonstration videos in the app are filmed by our own team, in a real gym, with real coaches and athletes in front of the camera. When you watch a jab breakdown or a jump rope demo, you are watching someone who actually teaches that technique. We covered the whole process in how we make the boxing tutorial videos, from planning the shots to filming between the heavy bags.

Generated video is getting impressive, and we still have no plans to use it for training content.

Form matters in boxing. A demonstration with slightly wrong mechanics teaches you slightly wrong mechanics, and a model does not know the difference. A coach does.

New ideas go through the same process

That way of working is not limited to boxing content. When we get an idea for something new, like jump rope back then or speed ladder work more recently, we start by admitting we are not the experts. We find people who are: coaches who teach that discipline, local gyms willing to work with us, and the athletes who train there. They tell us how the skill is actually learned, in what order the progressions come, and what beginners get wrong first.

Then we shoot videos with those athletes and put our teaching approach in front of real people before anything ships. If a drill confuses them or a progression moves too fast, we rework it and test again. The jump rope programs in the app came out of exactly that process, and whatever we add next will go through it too.

The whole team boxes

This part is simple: everyone on the team practices boxing regularly. We run the app’s workouts ourselves, week after week. That is often how rough edges get caught, because a timing issue or an awkward combo is obvious when you are the one in round six with your arms burning.

It also keeps us honest about what we build. Features get judged by whether they help an actual training session, and we feel it first, before any user does.

Sometimes the two sides of this article end up in the same room. Here is what a coding session can look like at our place: working at a standing desk, pausing every time the app calls out a combo to test it for real.

And we listen to you

The other humans in this story are the people training with the app. Feedback comes in every day, through reviews, emails, and messages, and we read all of it. When someone points out a combo that feels off, a confusing screen, or an exercise they wish existed, we listen and make adjustments when it makes sense. Plenty of what is in the app today started as a suggestion from someone mid-training.

That back and forth is the point. We want to build a community of people who box, who push each other, and who help shape where the app goes next. A pile of AI-generated workouts will not create that. People stick around because there are humans on the other side who train like they do and answer when they write in.

So that is our stance. AI is a useful tool for building software, and we will keep using it that way. The training itself stays with coaches, boxers, and people willing to test every round in person. If you want to see what human-proved workouts feel like, the app is free to try.

Training like this has real value. Keeping the shoulders relaxed and the feet light is exactly how technique gets smoother, and it makes a great recovery session between harder days. If you want to control how hard your rounds get, there is a whole guide on adjusting workout intensity in the app, from light flow like this to max effort.

You don’t need a ring for this either; a few feet of open floor works just as well. The app is free to try, so put it on, pick an easy pace, and enjoy a round like this one.

Set the intensity in a custom workout

When you build your own session, intensity sits in the Advanced section of the builder, next to warmup length and rest. Open it and you choose from Light, Moderate, Vigorous, or Max effort. The setting changes the pace of the rounds and how demanding the combos and cardio get, so the same workout structure can feel like a relaxed flow or a lung-burner depending on what you pick.

This is the most precise way to train. If you want footwork-heavy rounds at a Light pace one day and the exact same combos at Max effort the next, you control that directly. There is more on putting a full session together in the guide to building your own boxing workout.

Let Quick Start handle it

If you don’t feel like configuring anything, Quick Start generates a workout from a handful of choices, and intensity is one of them. The four options spell out exactly what they mean: Light is for when you are still getting in shape and don’t want to risk injury, Moderate gives you a decent workout without leaving you exhausted, Vigorous (the recommended default) is a solid session that burns calories, and Max effort pushes you as much as possible.

Pick a level, confirm the generated rounds, and start punching. You get a different workout every time, tuned to the effort you asked for. The same flow works great with equipment too, as covered in the Quick Start punching bag workout.

Or pick a pre-made workout that already fits

The workout library is full of sessions at every effort level, so sometimes the easiest move is to scroll and find one that matches your mood. The names and descriptions tell you what you are in for. HIIT sessions like 20 Minutes HIIT are built around high-intensity intervals and will leave you winded, while a guided warmup or a light freestyle round stays easy on purpose. If you want the science on why those interval sessions hit so hard, the piece on shadow boxing versus HIIT breaks it down.

Control the rest inside your combos

Intensity is not only about how hard you punch, it is also about how much you breathe between efforts. In the combo creator, you can set the default time between combos when you build a custom exercise. A short gap keeps you moving non-stop and turns the round into a conditioning grind. A longer gap gives you time to reset your stance and throw each combo clean, which is better when you are drilling technique rather than chasing a sweat. You can read more about that approach in building custom combos.

Or just follow the recommendations

If you would rather not think about any of this, you don’t have to. The app suggests workouts based on your boxing level and your training history, so you can open it, tap what it recommends, and go. That is the whole idea behind the workout recommendations: it does the deciding for you on the days you don’t want to.

Between custom intensity settings, Quick Start, the pre-made library, and combo timing, you can always land on a session that matches the day you are having. Download the app and try a Light round and a Max effort round back to back to feel the difference for yourself.

It is trickier than a plain punching combo because you have to fit two defensive head movements in between the punches without losing your rhythm or your balance. That is exactly what makes it worth drilling. Slipping and rolling on a set pattern teaches your head and upper body to move while your hands stay busy, which is the habit that keeps you from being a stationary target. The repetition drill loops the same sequence over and over, so the timing of the slip and the roll sinks into muscle memory rather than something you have to think about. If you want to work on the defensive side more broadly, the piece on training boxing defense at home covers how slips, rolls, and the rest fit into a session.

You can drill this exact combo, or any other you want to work on, straight from the app. It is free to download and there is plenty you can train without paying, so give it a try and run a few rounds of head movement of your own.

Dropping the guard on purpose is a way to mess with your own rhythm and bait a reaction out of an opponent. Carrying your hands low changes the angles you punch from, makes your timing harder to read, and tempts the other person into leading so you can counter. It is a skill you choose to use at the right moment, not a habit to fall into by accident, and it only works if your defense and footwork are sharp enough to cover for the open guard. Notice that even here the app is still calling “1 - Slip Left - 1 - 2”, so the head movement is doing the protecting that the hands normally would. There is more on when this style helps and when it gets you hit in the piece on boxing with your hands down.

You can build a round like this yourself today. Use the custom workout builder to set up bag rounds with the combos and defenses you want to drill low-guard, and we have dedicated exercises in the works that will fold this style into the regular workouts even more. The app is free to download and there is plenty you can train without paying, so give it a try and work a few rounds with your hands down.

That middle beat is what makes it useful. In an actual fight you almost never get to land a long, uninterrupted string of punches. You attack, the other person answers, and you have to deal with their reply before you can go again. Most beginners drill combos in a vacuum and build a habit of attacking with no thought for what comes back, which falls apart the moment someone punches at them. Forcing a block or a slip in between the two combos trains the reflex to cover up right after you punch, then reset and attack again on a fresh angle. If you want to go deeper on the defensive half of this, the piece on training boxing defense at home covers how blocks, slips, and rolls fit into a workout.

You can run this exercise yourself in the app, along with plenty of others that mix offense and defense the same way. It is free to download and there is a lot you can train without paying, so give it a try and work a few rounds of attack, defend, attack.