Why our app has a free boxing timer

When I built the Shadow Boxing App, the focus was on workouts. Pick your exercises, define the combos you want to practice, train with your heavy bag, and so on. That was the whole plan.

Where are the good free boxing timers?

As a boxer, not having a well-made boxing timer on iOS was genuinely annoying. I was sparring at the gym and kept struggling to restart the default iPhone timer between rounds. I downloaded a few apps, and they all had problems.

Some were free but loaded with ads. Others cost too much for something that should be a simple utility. Most of them stacked in a bunch of HIIT and Tabata features I had no use for, which made the whole thing more complicated than it needed to be.

What you actually need from a sparring timer

When you’re sparring, you need a timer that is:

• Simple to use, because you’ll be tired and not in the mood for menus
• Lets you set a round duration, defaulting to 3 minutes
• Has good volume, since a quiet beep is useless when you’re getting punched in the face
• Shows a large font with visual cues so you can check the time from across the room

So it’s now available on looks like this:

That’s it. No more, no less. Since I couldn’t find something that did just those four things well, I built it and released it as a free section of the app.

You can edit all the settings from there:

Free, and staying that way

The timer has no ads and no paywall. It’s been that way since launch and will stay that way as long as the app exists. If you want more than just the timer, the full features of the app go well beyond it, including guided workouts, technique videos, and an Apple Watch companion. But for sparring or a simple freestyle session, the free timer does exactly what it needs to.

If you are on Android, or just want something that loads instantly in any browser without installing anything, we also built a free online boxing round timer. The app version has more features and tighter integration with iOS, but the browser timer works on every device and is ready in seconds.