TickTock Clock is an Android app that puts a mechanical clock in a room that does not have one. It ticks every second, marks the quarters, and strikes the hour the way a real case clock does — twelve at noon, one at one o’clock. Leave it running in the background and the room keeps time.
What ships in the first release
Thirty-eight clocks and watches, each a complete instrument: its own tick, tock, quarter mark and hour chime. Families cover wall clocks (Vienna regulator, Black Forest cuckoo, Comtoise, Westminster, schoolhouse, railway platform and more), wrist watches (minute repeaters across metals, high-beat flutter, chronograph rotor), ritual pieces (Prague Orloj, Zen temple, incense clock, ship’s bell), pocket watches, and a couple of focus textures (air motion, brown noise).
Quarter marks and the hour chime each have their own switch, globally and per sound. Night silence mutes chimes between ten at night and seven in the morning so an overnight clock does not strike twelve at midnight. Playback runs as a media-playback foreground service with a notification stop button; an optional floating button (overlay permission) keeps the clock one tap away. The beat uses a low-latency audio path off the main thread so an animating screen cannot make the tick skip.
Privacy and permissions
The app requests no internet permission. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is tracked, no account is required, and every sound is bundled. It works the same in aeroplane mode. Optional permissions cover notifications (stop control outside the app) and display-over-other-apps for the floating button; settings can also link you to Android’s battery-optimisation list (no battery permission is declared). Full detail lives on the public policy page used for Play Console: TickTock Clock privacy policy.
// No INTERNET permission in the manifest — only local playback.
FOREGROUND_SERVICE + FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK
POST_NOTIFICATIONS
SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW // optional floating buttonAbout the sounds
Every clock sound in the app is AI-generated. None are recordings of real clocks, including presets named after specific instruments — that disclosure is in the Play listing and inside the app settings, not only in marketing copy. A separate Python toolkit in the sibling clock-sounds repo builds and curates the sample library before it is bundled into the APK.
A clock that drifts is not a clock — so the tick is a timing problem first and a sound-design problem second.
Status is pre-test: closed testing build prepared for Play; waiting on the tester threshold before a wider release. Package id com.ethingwillbefine.ticktock, Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, minSdk 26.