How to use Unichrono

Video tour

Every feature in under three minutes. Jump straight to a chapter below.

2:46

• 0:00Your cities
• 0:27Find the time
• 0:48Plan it
• 1:08Never miss it
• 1:27Widgets
• 1:50Everywhere
• 2:20Make it yours
• 2:33Private by design

Getting started

Two minutes from install to a live widget.

1. Open the app. Your own city is added on first launch, so the list is never empty. A short tour explains the main ideas, and you can replay it from Settings.
2. Add the places you care about. Tap +, search by city or country, tap a result. There are 34,804 cities, ranked so the big ones come first.
3. Rename them. Open a city and rename it: Mom, NYC office, Standup. Your name is what the app, the widgets and the alerts use.
4. Put a widget on the home screen. On Android: long-press an empty spot → Widgets → Unichrono, or use the in-app widget gallery. On iPhone: long-press the home screen → + → search Unichrono. On Mac: right-click the desktop → Edit Widgets → search Unichrono.
5. Set that widget up. Pick its cities, format and colours. From then on it keeps itself correct with no further input.

Your city list

The main screen. One card per place, live, in whatever order you want.

What each card shows

• Your label for the city, with its country flag before it (flags can be turned off).
• The current time there, 12- or 24-hour, with seconds if you switch them on.
• A part-of-day icon — morning, day, evening or night — on fixed local hours, so it reads the same on every phone.
• The context line: zone abbreviation and UTC offset (for example IST · UTC+5:30), how far ahead or behind your own phone it is, and whether that city is on Yesterday, Today or Tomorrow relative to you.
• In the week before the time difference to that city changes (daylight saving on either side), a small chip such as From Sunday: 4h ahead (now 5h). See Clock change warnings.

Managing the list

City groups

Sort cities into groups like Team, Family or Trip, and filter the list with one tap. Free on Android; part of Unichrono Pro on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

Groups are tags, not folders: a city can be in any number of groups, and deleting a group never deletes a city.

Groups elsewhere

• Widgets (iPhone, iPad): edit a widget and choose a Group to have it show that group's cities. Cities you pick individually win over the group; a deleted group falls back to your whole list.
• Apple Watch: the watch gets your iPhone's groups and shows a group row at the top of the list.
• Mac: the menu-bar panel has its own chips, and the Cities window a Groups strip. Mac groups belong to that Mac and do not sync.

City details

Tap any city to open its detail sheet.

• Country and time zone, with the current UTC offset.
• The local date in that city right now.
• Sunrise and sunset, calculated on the device from the city's coordinates. Change the date to check another day. Far north or south, where the sun does not rise or set at all, it says so rather than inventing a time.
• Currency and international dialling code — handy before a call or a transfer.
• Buttons that open the planner already anchored to that city.
• Rename, to give the city your own name.

Time travel

Answer "what time is it there when it's 4pm here" without arithmetic.

1. Open the ruler. Tap Time travel on the main screen.
2. Slide it. Every card re-bases to that moment at once, day labels included, so you can see who is already on tomorrow.
3. Jump to another date if the meeting is not today — the range runs about a hundred years either way, and daylight saving is applied for the date you land on.
4. Act on the moment. Hand the selected instant straight to an alarm or a meeting.
5. Close it to snap every card back to now.

Nothing you do in time travel changes your list or your widgets. It is a view, not an edit.

Share a time (iPhone, iPad): the share button in the time-travel panel sends the moment you landed on, with every visible city's time, as plain text. On Mac, Copy in the panel does the same. Free.

Type a time

Type the time you mean, in words, and every city jumps there.

1. Open time travel and tap the box that says Type a time (on Mac it is the convert box at the top of the panel).
2. Type a time and a place: 8am Tokyo, 3pm PST, 14:30 LHR, noon UTC+5:30, fri 9am new york, tomorrow 8pm. With no place, the time is in your own zone.
3. Read the answer underneath, for example 8:00 am Mon in Tokyo = 10:00 am Mon here.
4. Tap Go to move every city to that moment, or Add Tokyo to put that place in your list.

A bare hour picks the next time it comes round, so 8 late in the evening means 8 tomorrow morning. Prefer a browser? The same converter is at unichrono.app/time.

Alarms and meetings

One instant, every city, then turn it into something real.

The plan icon in the top bar opens a short menu: Alarm, Meeting, or City alerts. The first two open that board; the third opens your list of alerts. All three are the same kind of thing: something that happens at a time you choose, which is why they share one icon rather than crowding the bar.

How the board works

• Every city you keep is listed at the same moment in time. Change the time in any row and the others follow, so you can think in whichever city you think in.
• The row you edit becomes the anchor and is badged as such.
• Pick the time with the wheel or the dial, and move the whole board to another date.
• Add a city just for this board when you need to check somewhere that is not in your list.
• Availability dots mark who the slot lands badly for, so you see the 6 a.m. victim before you send the invite.

Alarm

Pick the time in any city and set the alarm. On Android, your phone's own clock app receives the matching local time. On iPhone, the alarm is scheduled with Apple's AlarmKit (iOS 26.1 or later) and rings on your device.

Meeting

• Add to calendar creates an event at that instant. On iPhone this uses Apple's write-only calendar access — the app can add the event you asked for and cannot read anything in your calendar.
• Share invite builds a text block listing the time in every city on the board, ready for chat or email.
• Alert me in this city turns the slot into a city alert.
• Label is optional and rides along into the event and the shared text.

City alerts

Be told when a chosen time arrives somewhere else.

1. Open the plan icon → City alerts. That opens the list of alerts you already have; the + on it creates a new one.
2. Choose a city — from your list or from the full search.
3. Pick the time in that city's local clock, and give it a label such as Remind Mom about Medicine.
4. Choose the repeat: once on a date, every day, or the weekdays you select.
5. Choose how it arrives: a silent notification, or spoken aloud with a buzz.

The list shows each alert's city, the time there, the repeat, and what that works out to in your own time, with a switch to turn it off without deleting it. Alerts are rescheduled automatically after a reboot.

Announce the time

Your own local time, said out loud, hands-free.

• Hourly announces on the hour, inside a window you set — a first hour it may speak and an hour from which it stays quiet. Set both the same to announce all day.
• Daily announces once, at the one time you choose.
• Try it plays a sample immediately so you can hear the voice before committing.
• Announcements respect the ringer: silenced means vibrate only, Do Not Disturb means silence.

This speaks your own device time. To be told about a time in another city, use a city alert instead.

Clock change warnings

Daylight saving moves the gap between you and your cities, on dates that differ by country. Unichrono tells you before it happens. iPhone, iPad and Android.

• On the card: for the seven days before the difference to a city changes, its card shows a chip such as From Sunday: 4h ahead (now 5h). It counts changes on either side — yours or theirs.
• A notification three days before, at 9 am your time. Cities changing on the same day share one notification.
• Settings: Clock change reminders (on by default) turns the notifications off. Unichrono never asks for notification permission just for this; if notifications are off, the chips still appear.

The rules come from your phone's time zone database, so a change announced by a government at short notice appears after your next system update.

Widgets

The main reason the app exists.

Why they never freeze

Most world-clock widgets redraw the time from a background job, which battery optimisation, Doze and OEM task killers eventually shut down — which is why competing widgets stop at some stale time. Unichrono runs nothing in the background to keep time. Each clock ticks straight from the system clock with its own timezone attached, so it stays live and correct with no process of ours running, and it costs no battery.

Android

• Add: long-press an empty part of the home screen → Widgets → scroll to Unichrono. Or open the in-app widget gallery, swipe through the styles and let it ask the launcher to place one.
• Set up: the setup screen opens as soon as the widget lands. Everything you choose applies to that one widget.
• Change it later: tap the widget — its setup screen reopens with the current cities and colours.
• Resize: long-press it and drag the handles. More space means more rows and more detail; less space means the widget shrinks its text and, if it must, shows a +N more footer rather than clipping a city.
• Remove: drag it to Remove. Its settings go with it; your city list is untouched.

iPhone & iPad

• Add to the Home Screen: long-press the wallpaper → + (top left) → search Unichrono → pick a widget and size → Add Widget.
• Add to the Lock Screen: long-press the Lock Screen → Customise → tap the area under the clock → choose a Unichrono accessory.
• Set up: long-press a placed widget → Edit Widget, then choose its cities and options.
• Browse first: the in-app widget gallery previews every style with live data. iOS does not let an app place a widget for you, so the gallery shows you what to look for and where.
• Remove: long-press → Remove Widget.

The widget types

Each is a separate widget with its own setup.

Availability, in detail

• Work window — 9:00 to 17:00 by default, in each city's own local time, in 30-minute steps. Overnight windows are fine.
• Shoulder — the amber edge either side, 1 hour by default.
• Work days — Monday to Friday by default, any set you like.

Widget setup options

What a widget's own setup offers, and how it relates to the app's settings.

Everything on a setup screen applies to that widget alone. Two World Clock widgets can hold different cities, formats and colours, and changing a setting in the app does not rewrite widgets you already placed.

Names on widgets

A widget snapshots the city names as they were when you set it up, so renaming a city in the app later does not silently rewrite a widget you were happy with. To change a widget's labels, edit them in that widget's setup.

Long names are shortened intelligently rather than chopped, so two cities on a small widget never end up looking identical.

Apple Watch

Your iPhone's cities on your wrist, with complications. Included with the iPhone app; the watch app installs from the Watch app on your iPhone.

1. Install it: on the iPhone, open the Watch app → scroll to Available apps → Install next to Unichrono (or it installs itself if Automatic App Install is on).
2. Open Unichrono on the iPhone once, then on the watch. Your cities appear within a few seconds.

Complications and the Smart Stack

Touch and hold the watch face → Edit → Complications → Unichrono. Free: City Time (every shape) and World Clock. With Pro: OK to Call? (green, amber or red by the city's working hours), Two Cities, Analog and Sun. Locked ones show a padlock; tap it to see how to unlock Pro on the iPhone. Unichrono also offers itself in the Smart Stack: turn the Digital Crown up from the watch face.

There is one city list. The iPhone is the source of truth; edits on the watch are sent to it and confirmed. Pro is the same purchase as on the iPhone and needs no separate buy. The free tier holds three cities, as on the iPhone.

Wear OS

Your Android phone's cities on your watch, a tile and a complication. Free.

1. Install it from the Play Store on the watch (search Unichrono), or from the phone's Play Store → Install on more devices.
2. Open Unichrono on the phone once after installing, so it sends your list. Any later change on the phone — a new city, a rename, a reorder, the 12/24-hour setting — reaches the watch within seconds.

• The app: every city with its time and how far ahead or behind it is. Tap one for a big readout; swipe right (or press back) to return to the list.
• The tile: swipe left from the watch face to the tiles, long-press → + → Unichrono. It shows your first four cities and changes exactly on the minute.
• The complication: edit your watch face → a complication slot → Unichrono. It shows the first city in your list that is not in the watch's own time zone, so it stays useful when you travel.

The watch shows the phone's list; cities are added and edited on the phone. It needs Google Play services on the phone, which handles the connection between phone and watch.

Siri, Spotlight & Control Center

iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. Nothing to set up.

Dynamic Island

Up to two cities, always on screen. Unichrono Pro, on iPhones with a Dynamic Island, iOS 18 or later.

1. Long-press a city card, or open the city, and choose Show in Dynamic Island. Pinning a third city replaces the oldest.
2. The cities' times sit in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen, ticking live.
3. Choose Remove from Dynamic Island to unpin.

iOS ends live activities after 12 hours; Unichrono puts them back the next time you open it. If nothing appears, turn on Settings → Unichrono → Live Activities in iOS Settings.

Android — where every setting lives

Open the app → the gear icon. In the order you meet them.

Clocks in the notification shade

1. Turn on Clocks in notification. On Android 13+ you are asked for notification permission once.
2. Pull down the shade from anywhere — your cities are there, ticking live, with your labels and format.
3. Tap it to jump into the app. Swipe it away when you are done; dismissing it is respected rather than undone.

It is optional, off by default, and ticks from the system clock, so it costs nothing to leave on.

The Quick Settings tile

Pull the shade down fully, edit your tiles, and drag Unichrono in for a fast glance and a one-tap way back into the app.

Keeping it reliable

Widgets and the notification work with no setup on most phones. Some manufacturers restrict apps aggressively, which can remove the ongoing notification or stop it reappearing after a reboot. If that happens, allow Unichrono to run in the background — wording differs by phone:

• Settings → Apps → Special app access → Background power management → Unichrono → Don't restrict
• Battery settings for Unichrono → Unrestricted
• Battery optimisation list → Unichrono → Don't optimise

Protect the notification in Settings detects your phone's flavour and opens the right page where it can.

iPhone & iPad — where every setting lives

Open the app → the gear icon. Widget appearance lives on the widget itself.

Widget appearance on iPhone

iOS draws the widget's options itself: long-press a placed widget → Edit Widget. Cities, colour, time format and the rest are chosen there, per widget.

Permissions, and when they are asked

Nothing is requested at launch. Each of these is asked only the first time you use that feature, and declining one leaves the rest of the app working normally.

Spoken alerts use the system's built-in voice. That needs no permission, records nothing, and never touches the microphone.

Lock Screen accessories

Long-press the Lock Screen → Customise → tap the area under the clock → add a Unichrono accessory. Long-press a placed accessory to choose which city it shows.

Mac — where every setting lives

Unichrono lives in the menu bar, with no Dock icon. Click its clock → Settings.

The menu bar panel

Click the clock in the menu bar to open the panel: every city with its time, day and offset, and the time-travel ruler along the bottom. Drag the ruler and every clock moves together. The buttons underneath open Cities, Plan (Reminder…, Meeting…, Alerts…), Widgets and Settings.

The menu bar itself shows up to three cities. Choose them in Cities with the Show in menu bar tick.

Reminders and meetings

The plan board works as it does on iPhone, with two Mac differences. Set reminder saves a one-time city alert: a notification at that moment, listed under Alerts…. Add to Calendar hands the meeting to Apple's Calendar app as a standard event file, and Calendar asks you to confirm it, so Unichrono never needs access to your calendar. Copy puts the meeting, with every city's time, on the clipboard.

Widgets on Mac

Right-click the desktop → Edit Widgets → search Unichrono, and drag a widget onto the desktop or into Notification Centre. Right-click a placed widget → Edit to choose its cities, colour and format.

Permissions

Notifications, asked the first time you save a city alert or reminder. Calendars, asked only if you turn on Show my next meeting; the calendar is read on your Mac to find the next meeting and nothing leaves it. Unichrono opens or saves a file only when you pick one yourself with Export or Import.

Troubleshooting

My widget shows the wrong time

Unichrono reads your phone's clock and applies each city's timezone rules from the database the OS ships. If every city is off by the same amount, the phone's own clock is wrong — turn on automatic date and time. If one city looks wrong right around a daylight-saving change, install the latest system update, since the timezone rules come with it.

The launcher says "Couldn't add widget" (Android)

Some launchers refuse a widget dropped onto a spot too small for it. Free up a bigger area and try again, or add it from the in-app widget gallery, which asks the launcher to place it for you.

My widget lost a city, or shows "+2 more"

It ran out of room. The widget shrinks its text first and only then hides the overflow, so the cities you do see are never clipped. Make it wider or taller, or switch its row detail to Compact.

The clocks notification disappeared (Android)

Almost always the phone's battery manager removed it. See Keeping it reliable. Re-enabling it brings it back immediately.

My alerts arrive a few minutes late (Android)

Exact alarms are not permitted for the app. Open the alerts screen and tap Allow exact alarms; the banner disappears once granted.

An alert stayed silent

Check that notifications are allowed for Unichrono, and that the phone is not silenced or in Do Not Disturb / a Focus. Spoken alerts deliberately only vibrate when the ringer is off.

"Set alarm" is greyed out (Android)

Android's alarm handoff carries an hour and a minute but no date, so it always means the next time that hour comes round. When the moment you picked would ring on the wrong day, Unichrono disables the button instead of setting a misleading alarm. Use a calendar event or a city alert.

I can't set an alarm on my iPhone

Scheduled alarms use Apple's AlarmKit, which needs iOS 26.1 or later. On older versions, use a calendar event or a city alert instead.

I can't find Unichrono on my Mac

It has no Dock icon and no main window: look for its clock in the menu bar, top right. When the menu bar is crowded, macOS hides the items that don't fit, so quit an app that has its own menu bar icon, or show fewer cities there.

My Mac didn't speak an alert

Speech on Mac needs Unichrono to be running. Turn on Launch at login in Settings, and check the Mac's volume isn't muted.

Renaming a city did not change my widget

That is intentional — widgets keep their own labels so an in-app rename cannot rewrite a widget you already set up. Edit the labels in that widget's own setup.

The Analog widget is not available on my phone

It needs Android 12 or newer. Below that, Android cannot give an analog face its own timezone, so it could only ever show your local time.

My group chips disappeared

Settings → Show groups is off. Turn it on and your groups come back exactly as they were. On iPhone, iPad and Mac groups are part of Pro, so they also hide if Pro isn't active.

A shared group file won't open, or imports only cities

On iPhone, choose Unichrono from the share sheet or Files; on Android and Mac use Settings → Import clocks. Some file pickers show .unichrono files as "BIN file"; that is fine. Cities you already have are not added twice. If the group itself isn't created, you already have 12 groups, or (iPhone, Mac) Pro isn't active — the cities still come in.

Typing a time doesn't find my place

Try the city name in full, an airport code, or an offset such as UTC+5:30. A city name wins over an airport code with the same letters. For an abbreviation that means several zones, pick one from the choices shown.

I didn't get a clock change warning

Check Clock change reminders is on and that notifications are allowed for Unichrono. The notification arrives three days ahead at 9 am; the chip on the card shows for the last seven days. Changes in your own zone count too, but a city whose difference to you stays the same (you both change on the same day) has nothing to warn about.

My Apple Watch shows "Open Unichrono on your iPhone"

The watch hasn't received your list yet. Open Unichrono on the iPhone with the watch nearby and unlocked; the list arrives in a few seconds. If it still doesn't, restart the watch app. Pro complications stay locked until the watch has synced with an iPhone that has Pro.

My Wear OS watch shows "Open Unichrono on your phone"

Open Unichrono on the phone once with the watch connected. The phone must have Google Play services (phones without them, such as recent Huawei models, can't sync with Wear OS). If the watch says Update Unichrono on your phone, the phone app is older than the watch app.

The Wear OS tile or complication shows the wrong city or time

The complication shows the first city that isn't in the watch's own time zone, so it changes when you travel. Both refresh by themselves on the minute and whenever your list or the watch's time zone changes; if one looks stuck, remove and re-add it.

Siri doesn't understand the city

Siri recognises your saved cities and a hundred major ones by name. For anywhere else, add the city to your list first, or use "Convert a time with Unichrono" and type the place.

Nothing shows in the Dynamic Island

It needs Pro, an iPhone with a Dynamic Island and iOS 18 or later, and Live Activities allowed: iOS Settings → Unichrono → Live Activities. After 12 hours iOS ends it; opening Unichrono brings it back.

Sending feedback, and the rating prompt

Sending feedback

Settings → Help → Request a feature/Report a bug opens a short form in your browser. It takes general comments too, despite the name. It is one form for three things, and its first question is which one you are doing:

• Feature request: a widget you wish existed, a city that is missing, a setting that should be there. What you would use it for is the part that decides.
• Bug report: a wrong time, a widget that will not place, an alert that stayed silent.
• Something else: anything that is neither, including telling us something works well.

The app version, your phone model and your OS version arrive already filled in, so you do not have to go looking for them. They are ordinary boxes on the form and you can clear any of them before sending. Nothing is sent until you press submit, and the app itself never talks to the internet: it hands the link to your browser and stops there. Your email is optional and exists only so we can reply.

The same form is on this site, on the feedback page, if you would rather not go through the app.

The rating prompt

Once you have used Unichrono for a while, it may ask whether you would like to rate it: on Android as you leave the app, on iPhone the next time you open it. It has three answers, and "Already rated" stops it for good.

That button exists because neither Google Play nor the App Store will tell an app whether you have actually rated it. There is no way for Unichrono to check, so it has to take your word for it, which it does, permanently. "Not now" is not permanent, but the prompt is capped at three appearances over the life of the install and spaces them weeks apart.

Rating is entirely optional and nothing in the app is held back if you never do it.

Privacy and data

• On Android the app has no network permission. It cannot send anything anywhere, and the city data ships inside the app rather than being fetched.
• The one thing that can leave your device is a feedback form you fill in yourself, which opens in your browser rather than being sent by the app.
• No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no tracking SDKs, on any platform.
• The watch apps talk only to your own phone. Apple Watch and iPhone exchange your city list and settings over Apple's connection between paired devices; a Wear OS watch and its Android phone use Google Play services' phone-to-watch connection, the same one every Wear OS app uses. Neither Unichrono watch app has network permission, and nothing goes to us or to any server of ours.
• On Mac, Show my next meeting reads your calendar on the Mac only, and only when you turn it on.
• Your cities, labels, widget settings and alerts are stored on the device only, and go when the app goes.
• The permissions it does ask for are the obvious ones, requested only when you first use the feature that needs them.
• City data comes from GeoNames.org, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Full details are in the privacy policy.

Still stuck?

Use the form — it takes a minute and needs no sign-in. Include your phone model and the app version from Settings → About if something is broken.

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