How do I move my interval presets to a new phone?

If your timer has export, the whole move is three steps: export your plans as a file on the old phone, move that file any way you already move files, and import it on the new phone. The library arrives with names, rounds, and per-exercise times intact. If your timer has no export, there is no move, only re-entry by hand, so check for export before you spend weeks tuning a plan you cannot take with you.

Can I share my timer plans with a training partner or my coach?

If plans export as files, the file is the plan. Send it the way you send a photo, and whoever receives it imports it on their side. A coach can build a session once and hand the same file to everyone in the group, so each person runs identical intervals on their own phone instead of re-keying the numbers and hoping nothing slipped.

Do I need an account to move my plans between devices?

In Intertakt, no. Plans are stored on your device, export and import work through plain files, and no account is required for any of it. As a category pattern, an account in the middle of a transfer can meter, hold, or lose the thing it carries, and it adds failure modes a file never has: a password, a server, a policy.

Is export and import part of the free tier?

In Intertakt it sits in Premium, a single payment in Google Play with no trials and no renewals. The free tier keeps three named plans with autosave and the whole timer; Premium removes the plan cap, adds session history, and adds export and import of your plans as plain JSON files. Whatever app you use, check where export lives before you invest a season of tuning in it.

Moving presets between phones: export, import, share

A one-star review from August reads, in its entirety: “She tried to share them and it won’t upload we have tried everything.” The “them” is a set of custom interval timers. The “we” is two people with one library of tuned workouts between them and an upload that refuses every attempt. The timing was never the complaint. What failed was the least glamorous moment in a timer’s life: the minute a configuration has to leave one phone and arrive on another.

What moves when a plan moves

Open a plan you actually use and look at it. A name you chose. Rounds. Work and rest per exercise when the circuit is mixed: swings at 40 and stretches at 15, bag work at 3:00 with 0:30 back. A per-exercise circuit can run a dozen lines of numbers, and every line is a decision you made with your own body as the measuring instrument. What rest do you actually recover in after 40 seconds of swings? No default answers that. You did, by running it wrong for a month — the kind of number a deeper guide to interval structure exists to help you pick.

As a file, all of it is a few kilobytes of text, smaller than one photo from the same phone. Which sets up the strange part: the usual ways of moving those kilobytes between timer apps include mandatory accounts, cloud sync that wants both ends online at once, and watch pairings that stall halfway through a transfer.

The trips a library takes

New phone day is the boring trip and the important one. The test of whether you own your workouts is whether they survive the upgrade, not just the night. A timer with no export does not lose your library on purpose; it just never lets the library leave, so the old phone becomes the archive, until it becomes e-waste with your training inside it. What saving should mean is a separate question, covered here: autosave on every change, plus a copy that lives outside the app.

The coach-to-athlete version has higher stakes. A coach dials a session in once, down to the per-exercise numbers, and hands the same plan to everyone in the group. Each athlete runs identical intervals on their own phone, and nobody re-keys the numbers by hand, which is where transcription errors live. Run the other way, it is onboarding: the beginner gets the coach’s exact session instead of a screenshot of it.

Partner to partner is where this article started. Two people, one household, one session they both train to, and a share button that uploads to nothing. The failure cost an evening, and then it cost the session itself, which got skipped.

Sync is the wrong shape for this job

The dominant answer among timer apps is sync: plans live on a server, every device talks to the server, and portability is supposed to fall out of that. When sync works it is invisible. The reviews show up when it does not. “It takes forever to sync the custom timers,” from September. And on a watch pairing, from August: “it just spins and spins. I have to completely shut down my Apple Watch.”

That is not bad luck, it is architecture. Sync puts a server between you and your own settings, so the list of things that can fail on moving day includes the server’s uptime, its account system, its storage limits, and its business model. A file cuts the middleman out of the job. Export the plan, move it through a channel you already trust, whether that is a message, a mail, a drive folder, or a cable, and import it on the other end. The trip works exactly as well as the channel does and no better, which is at least a failure you can see and retry.

What a portable plan should look like

Plain text in a format a human can read. JSON is the sensible default in this category: open the file and there are your plans, names and numbers, in rows you can check before trusting them. This matters more than it sounds. A readable file can be inspected, kept in a folder, compared line by line after a change, mailed to your future self. An opaque blob can only be believed.

Questions worth asking of any timer’s export, before the day you need it. Does export produce the whole library or one plan at a time? Does import add to what is on the phone or replace it? Do exact numbers survive the trip, odd ones like 35/25 included? If the answers are hard to find in the app or its store listing, that is an answer too, and you got it before the tuning instead of after.

Where Intertakt stands

Plans are named and autosaved as you edit them, stored on your device. The free tier keeps three of them, and the timer under them stays free with no session cap. Export and import sit in Premium, a single payment in Google Play with no trials and no renewals: your plans as plain JSON files, moving between phones, platforms, or a friend, with no account required for any of it. The full pricing shape, including what free keeps forever, is laid out here.

Intertakt is out on Google Play. If you want one email when the iOS version lands, leave your address on the waitlist here.