Time Cop

A time tracking app that respects your privacy and gets the job done without getting too fancy.

Motivation

I’d rather not do time-tracking at all, but since its a necessity for my work, it’s either use an app or keep track of things manually (which I’m terrible at). There are many time tracking apps on the app stores (and I have tried several of them), but each of them has at least one pain point that eventually drives me off—some cost more money than I think they should, others have (what I consider) poorly designed interfaces, some are way too complicated, some don’t export data easily, most require an internet connection, I have privacy concerns with a large number of them, etc, etc.

Time tracking in and of itself is rather straightforward (hence all the apps on the app stores), so I figured “why not use this as an opportunity to practice mobile development and learn some new things?”. This app is the result of that question—its a tool that I use every day for work, but also a sample project to work off of and share with others.

Features

Offline-only, mobile-first
For Android (Google Play, F-Droid), iOS, and Linux
Fully private—there is no tracking / spying / advertising / etc
Keep track of tasks with multiple parallel timers that can be started with the tap of a button
Associate timers with projects to group your work (or don’t)
Start, stop, edit, and delete timers whenever with no fuss
Export data as a .csv file, filtered by timespans and projects
Export the app’s database for full access to all of its data
Automatic light mode / dark mode based on your device settings
Localized in several languages (thanks to Google Translate): English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), as well as Italian, Czech, Norwegian, and Indonesian (via contributors)
Open source (licensed under Apache-2.0)—fork away!

Screenshots

More screenshots (including dark-mode and localization demonstrations) are available in the screenshots/ folder.

Contributing

I’m happy to take bug reports and pull requests if you want to help improve Time Cop, but I fundamentally want to keep this app relatively small and simple. If that’s not for you, there’s plenty of other options out there.

The app is created pretty much entirely in Dart using Flutter, and I tried to make heavy use of the Bloc pattern.

Here are a few resources to get you started if this is your first Flutter project:

For help getting started with Flutter, view its online documentation, which offers tutorials, samples, guidance on mobile development, and a full API reference.

After installing and setting up Flutter (ideally its latest stable version) and downloading the Time Cop code, you should be able to simply build and run this Flutter project, at least for mobile platforms. For more information, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Localizations

You can help translate Time Cop on Weblate. If you notice any incorrect strings, feel free to correct them. Similarly, if you want to add a language, please do!

Translations are handled using Project Fluent. Currently all translations except English, Italian, Czech, Norwegian, and Indonesian were auto-translated by Google Translate using my Translate Tool.

Todo

A list of “user stories” (and I use that term very loosely) guiding the development of this app is available in design/user-stories.md; any unchecked boxes are outstanding items on the todo list!