Still Minutes: A Calm Timer That Tracks Your Meditation Practice

Most meditation apps greet you with a paywall before you've taken a single breath. Still Minutes skips all of that. Open it, set a duration, tap start, and you're sitting. The app fades back while you focus, then a soft chime brings you out when your time is done.

The idea is simple: a timer that respects the practice. No account to create, no content library competing for your attention, no streak counter designed to make you feel bad on the days you miss. Just your sit, your minutes, and a quiet record of how it's all adding up.

A timer that gets out of your way

Tap the live demo above and you'll see what we mean immediately. The main screen is almost nothing: a session length picker, a start button, and a calm progress ring that fills as your sit unfolds. There's no onboarding, no tutorial overlay, no permission request for your contacts.

During a sit the screen dims to just the ring and the remaining time. If you've set interval chimes, a gentle bell sounds at each marker without interrupting the silence in any jarring way. When the session ends, another chime closes the sit and the app records your minutes automatically.

Configure it once, then forget it

Still Minutes doesn't make you re-configure each session from scratch. Set your preferred session length and interval chime spacing once, and those become your defaults every time you open the app. A five-minute lunch break sit and a thirty-minute morning sit each need only a single tap to begin.

Interval chimes are genuinely useful for beginners who lose track of time. Setting one at the halfway point gives your mind a gentle checkpoint without breaking the sit. More experienced meditators often set them at the quarter-hour marks during longer sessions. Try adjusting the spacing in the demo and starting a short sit to hear how it lands.

Progress you can actually see

After each sit, Still Minutes updates three numbers: your total minutes this month, your current day streak, and the count of distinct days you've sat. Below those, a weekly bar chart shows your minutes across the last seven days at a glance. It's not designed to pressure you, just to show you honestly where you are.

The history list underneath logs every completed sit with its date and duration. If you accidentally start and stop a session, swipe to delete it. Everything stays on your device, no sync, no cloud, no account. Close the app and come back a week later and your data is exactly where you left it.

Research on habit formation consistently points to visible cumulative progress as one of the strongest adherence signals. When you can see that you've already sat for ninety minutes this month, picking up the phone for tomorrow's ten minutes feels less optional and more like continuing something real.

Who this is actually built for

If you're already deep into a content-driven app like Headspace or Calm and the guided sessions are working for you, Still Minutes probably isn't your tool. It's built for the person who already knows how to sit quietly and just needs a reliable timer that isn't going to ask for a credit card.

That includes a lot of people: meditators who traveled for years before smartphone apps existed and just want a bell, busy professionals doing five or ten minutes at their desk between calls, beginners who tried a subscription app and found the content overwhelming, and anyone who's ever searched the App Store for a 'simple offline meditation timer' and ended up with something that required an account to even set the duration.

The monthly log matters most for people who practice short sits regularly. A twenty-minute morning session is easy to feel proud of. Ten three-minute sits scattered through a week feel less significant until you see them add up to thirty minutes in the log. Still Minutes makes that visible without turning it into a competitive score.

Built from one idea, works right now

Still Minutes started as a single sentence: a calm offline meditation timer that tracks monthly minutes without accounts or ads. From that description, the app you see embedded above was assembled and made interactive. The problem it solves is narrow and specific, and that's exactly why it works.

There's a version of this tool that could have been overengineered: social sharing, themed soundscapes, a coach that messages you, a premium tier for extra chime sounds. None of that is here, and that's a deliberate choice. The best tool for a focused practice is usually the one that removes friction rather than adding features.