Zazen Meditation Timer

★★★★★ Good for zazen. If you don't know what that is, it's the sitting meditation done in soto and rinzai zen Buddhism. Bells are rung to let you know when meditation has started and ended. This wee guy does the bell ringing for you and won't forget or fall asleep. Sessions of different length can be programmed in, so if you do 30 minutes of zazen and 10 of kinhin, you can easily programme this and any other composition of session in and have custom bell sounds marking each. It also handily puts your phone into do not disturb and turns alarm volume off BUT won't switch them on again on some phone models when the session ends. Hey I have a fairphone 2 so such issues are par for the course... You could use this app to countdown anything and represent it visually and ring bell alerts for you. The screen can be kept on or time out, but the alarms and alerts it makes will sound regardless. A great app which is very customisable.

★★★★★ Best meditation timer so far: you can create several different meditation sessions with customizable section times and bells. This app plays quite well with other background music like Rain Rain, and has a simple and beautiful user interface. Minor clitch is that the app leaves phone in silent mode if you exit it too quickly, otherwise this is the perfect app for meditation.

★★☆☆☆ It used to be a perfect meditationtimer, but the latest update screwed it up quite a bit. Now it doesn't mute the phone when it is in sound mode and the bell doesn't sound when phone is muted.

★★☆☆☆ This could be a useful app. But it has some serious bugs. Sometimes the phone does not switch back to normal mode and stays silent. But what's even more annoying is that in my case, the bell which finishes the meditation does not ring until I unlock the phone. And that is the one job I expected this app do.

★★☆☆☆ It used to be great. I paid the small fee for the pro app. Then they just changed the interface. Now it's useless. After 30 minutes of trying to set up a simple 20 minute session, I uninstalled. PS, help was of no use either.

★★☆☆☆ Couldn't figure it out. Controls aren't obvious. Navigation should be more obvious. Thanks anyway.