I’m working on a Pomodoro app for educational purposes. I use Timer for UI updates and making ticks every second to update state time delta’s and using time elapsed to calculate time remaining and all of the logic. However, when I minimize the app, it gets suspended. There is no way to run such Timer or do any background processing to update state of pomodoro (and actually switching from work -> break and so forth).

I wanted to make my pomodoro app to work in background and be able to automatically switch states and perform other updates as well as notify user about break time and so on. (take a look at “Flow” app for iOS)

• Tried BackgroundTask, but it has it’s own limitations and should be used mostly for network tasks.
• Tried background mode – Audio -> but that should not be used for other purposes than playing video/audio, otherwise Apple can dismiss the app easily

How are these applications actually being made? Is there any secret I should know about?