Rounds
iPhone, iPad and Mac · Free, with one unlock

You should be moving,
not watching a clock.

Rounds counts your workout down for you. Build it once out of exercises and rests, press play, and put the phone where you can hear it. The last seconds of every step turn red and beep once a second, so you know the change is coming without looking up.

Coming to the App Store

Version 1.0 is built and it is not in the shop yet. This page says so until Apple lets it through, and then it says the date instead.

What it costs See the other apps
Free
to build, save and run every workout
45
exercises built in, plus your own
3
devices, one purchase
Two ways in

A named workout, or plain rounds of work and rest

Most timers make you pick one of those and live with it. Rounds does both, and the one you start with is a button on the home screen, not a setting buried three screens down.

Build a workout

Add an exercise, give it a length, add a rest, give that one a length too, and keep going for as long as the session needs. Every step is named, so the screen tells you what you are doing rather than only how long is left.

Pick from the built-in catalogue or type your own name. A name you type is kept, and it is one tap away the next time.

Or set rounds

When the movement does not need naming — a circuit, a bag, a sprint — say how many rounds, how long you work and how long you rest, and the whole session is built for you. It opens at ten rounds of ninety seconds on and thirty off, and every one of those three numbers is yours to change.

There is no rest tacked on after the final round, because nobody wants one there.

Save it and use it again

A session you built becomes a template with its times already in it. Edit it, duplicate it when you want to change one thing without spoiling the original, archive the ones you are not using this month, delete the ones you are done with.

Swipe a card to reach any of that. The archive folds away on its own.

The part that matters

Made to be read from two metres away, upside down, out of breath

The whole screen carries the phase, so the colour answers your question before the number does. Work is green. Rest is blue. The last seconds are red.

The warning is heard, not seen

In the closing seconds of a step the screen turns red and the app beeps once a second. You choose whether that window is the last three, five or ten seconds — and you choose it separately for exercises and for rests, because the two are not the same problem. Out of the box it is five seconds before work ends and three before a rest does.

It works where you put the phone

Portrait and landscape are the same layout laid out two ways, so a phone propped against a water bottle reads as well as one in your hand. On an iPad the whole thing simply grows.

The screen does not dim mid-set, and the sound plays even with the ringer switched off.

It knows what is next

The name of the coming step is on screen while the current one runs, so a rest is never a blank pause you have to guess your way out of. Pause, skip forward, go back a step.

Time is counted against the clock rather than by adding up ticks, which is why a session is still right after the app has been in your pocket.

Eleven looks for the countdown, and one of them is yours. Classic, Autumn, Galaxy, Night Knight, Gamma, Heather, Pink Pop, Summer, Holiday, Shih Tzu — and Custom, where you pick the background and the digits yourself. A theme belongs to the workout, not to the app, so the sprint session and the stretching session can look nothing alike.

What is in the box

Forty-five exercises, seven groups, and a drawer for yours

Warm-up, cardio, core, legs, upper body, full body and mobility — forty-five movements in all, searchable, with the ones you used last kept near the top. Anything missing is a name you type once and keep.

Seven groups, and an eighth that is yours

The catalogue is sorted the way a session is planned, not alphabetically: you go looking for something to warm up with, or something for legs. The exercises you named yourself sit in a group of their own and behave exactly like the built-in ones.

Your three devices agree

Workouts, the exercises you named yourself and your name travel between your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac through your own iCloud. There is no account to make and no server of ours in the middle — the copy that travels sits in your Apple Account, under Apple's keys, and we cannot read it.

It speaks your language

Rounds follows whatever your device is set to, so there is no language switch to find.

It asks your name once, at the start, and uses it. That is the only thing it ever asks you for.

What it costs

Free to use. One payment to quiet it down.

Every feature on this page is in the free app: both modes, all forty-five exercises, all eleven themes, the templates, the sync, the ten languages. Nothing is held back behind the payment, and there is nothing to subscribe to.

The app
Free

The whole app, with nothing withheld. It shows our own promotion for the unlock: a small labelled banner on the home screen, and a full screen that can appear after a workout you have finished — never during one, no more often than every second finish, and at most twice a day. There is no advertising network behind any of it.

One payment No ads
$9.99

It removes the banner and the full screen and changes nothing else, because there is nothing else to change. It is not a subscription: nothing renews, there is no trial that turns into a charge and no key to lose. One purchase covers the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac, and Restore purchase brings it to your next device.

49 zł in Poland, and the local equivalent everywhere else — Apple works those amounts out from the Polish one, so your own store shows you the price in your own currency.

Apple is the seller, not us. The payment is made to Apple, no invoice comes from us, and a refund is Apple's to give — through reportaproblem.apple.com. We never see your card or your billing address. The full version of that is in Terms & Licence, section 11 and on the refunds page. If something is broken, write to us anyway — Apple giving you your money back does not fix the app.

Your data

There is no server. There is nothing to ask us for.

The section of our privacy policy that covers Rounds was written against the app's source code rather than against a good intention, and it names the only two things that involve Apple: iCloud and the payment.

It collects nothing No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier and no tracking of any kind. The app ships a privacy manifest that declares no tracking and no collected data types at all, and it contains no code that opens a network connection.
Your workouts stay yours They live on your device, and in your own iCloud if you are signed in — which is how the three devices agree with each other. That is your Apple Account, not ours. Deleting the app takes the local copy with it.
The promos are ours, not an ad network's What you see is the app promoting its own unlock, drawn by the app itself. There is no ad SDK and no bidding system in it, which is why it never asks permission to track you and shows the same thing to everybody.
Read the policy for Rounds
Fresh from the oven

Changelog

Version one is finished and waiting on Apple, so this entry has no date yet. It gets one the day the app reaches the App Store.

1.0Not out yetNew
  • The first one. A workout timer for iPhone, iPad and Mac, with the same app and the same purchase on all three.
  • Two ways to build a session. A named workout of exercises and rests with a length on each step, or plain rounds of work and rest with the count set once.
  • Forty-five exercises in seven groups, searchable, plus any name you type — and a name you type is kept for next time.
  • Templates that survive. Save a session with its times, then edit, duplicate, archive or delete it from the card itself.
  • A countdown you do not have to watch. The phase colours the whole screen, the closing seconds turn red and beep once a second, and the window is three, five or ten seconds — set separately for exercises and rests.
  • Eleven themes, one of them yours to build, each belonging to the workout rather than to the app.
  • Portrait and landscape, on the phone and on the tablet, in one layout that reads both ways. The screen stays awake and the sound plays with the ringer off.
  • Your own iCloud keeps the three devices in step — workouts, your own exercise names and your name. No account, no server of ours.
  • Ten languages, taken from the device: English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese.
  • Free, with one optional payment that removes the promos. No subscription, no tracking, no advertising network.
Almost out of the oven

Put the phone down. Listen for the beeps.

Rounds comes out of the same kitchen as the rest of these apps. It does not wear the apron, because a person looking for a workout timer types “workout timer” — but it is made by the same hands, answered by the same inbox and covered by the same policy.

Coming to the App Store See the other apps

Made for iPhone and iPad on iOS 18 or later, and for Mac on macOS 15 or later, in ten languages. It asks for no permissions at all.

Made with a wooden spoon and a stopwatch.