Flora - Green Focus 4+

Helped Keep me focused and Motivated

The timer feature itself was all I was looking for; but soon came to realize there was more. The app is cute and nicely laid out with easy tracking of focus time and break time. Every focus session grows little plants from different locations around the world using the “world tour” feature. This app won’t let you leave the app and go do something else or else a tree or plant is ‘killed’ so I bring myself back to focus. But not just digital plants are being grown, with a very small subscription, you can make it so that every focus session allows a real tree somewhere in their many locations worldwide to actually to planted, therefore a huge help to the environment and you get your work done. Generally a great tool. The only thing I think is unfair is you get penalized for canceling a session or pausing the timer. Sometimes, things happen for a while and we are unable to follow through. It could just be a bathroom break, a desperate drink, a call from a a co-resident. A pause in the timer or a cancel of a session because you realized a bit late like,” Oh wait, I’m not actually starting work yet. I haven’t done this or that. I’ll start later.” Otherwise it’s a good tool and really adorable in design.

Does what it’s advertised for, but could be better optimised

It’s a good app if you’d like to form new habits and cement them via timeblocking. I’ve used this app for a little over 2 weeks for my language learning immersion and it’s very effective at helping me do a little at a time. I think they also fixed the issue of your tree being accidentally killed if you make one mistake, even if you were still paying attention to what you were doing (this was very annoying for me and turned me off the app initially, because I would lose an hours worth or more of progress simply because my phone screen decided to do its own thing).

And of course, I can’t fail to bring up their subscription service. While I haven’t personally subscribed and so I can’t commentate on the benefits other than what’s being told, the idea of planting trees in poorer countries is absolutely sweet and I’m glad there’s people who use this app to do good around the planet.

That being said, the reason why I can’t give Flora a full 5 star review is because the “allow Flora to let you use background apps” option, which I’d like to enable as I have some things I’d like to timeblock that’s exclusive to my phone, is completely broken and doesn’t work. If you’d like to timeblock / track your time spent on a given activity and still need full, uninterrupted access to your phone to do the thing you want to track, you’d be better off setting a timer or using an app that lets you do this (like Flow).

Needs some fixes

I love the concept behind this app, but I’ve experienced some problems with it in the past. For example, there are times when I spend 40-90 minutes studying and once the timer is up, I’m directed toward a “connection failure” menu even when I’m connected to the Internet. This screen will not disappear until I close and refresh the app, which prevents me from earning the time spent on my different goal trackers.

At times, when I open the app after the timer goes off, there are messages saying that one of my tress was killed, even when my phone remained untouched the whole time.

It would also be helpful if there was a “0 minutes” mark when planting a tree for when people want to focus for exactly one or two hours. Maybe you could also add minutes that are not just multiples of five for those that need to concentrate for a very specific amount of time.

This last point is not a flaw but something I would like to see in the app. As a busy student, I like to keep track of multiple aspects of my life, and I would like this app to have more than just six goal trackers if it were possible. It would be truly beneficial as there are some aspects of my life I’d like to monitor too besides my six main ones.

This app has helped me a lot in concentrating on my homework and studying during the summer and with some fixes, it could be even better.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, Thanks for your feedback. You might have encountered server updates that false kill your trees and we are sorry for that. We will continue making app better for you. Have a nice day!