DEVELOPER STORIES

A thoughtfully considered planning app geared toward the neurodivergent community, Tiimo is approachable, easy to use, and powered by a strong understanding of its audience.

“Tiimo is designed with the neurodivergent brain in mind,” says cofounder and co-CEO Helene Lassen Nørlem from the company’s Copenhagen offices, “but we’ve found that approach can also be universal. We believe very much in designing for one specific group and their needs. But we also see that many of our users don’t identify as neurodivergent and love the way that we represent time.”

Now, thanks to a migration to SwiftUI, Tiimo natively brings those benefits to Apple platforms. We caught up with Nørlem and iOS lead Jakob Mikkelsen about Tiimo’s move to SwiftUI.

Available on: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch
Team size: 15
Based in: Copenhagen, Denmark
Awards: Apple Design Award finalist (2024)

Where did the idea for Tiimo come from?

Nørlem: My cofounder Melissa Würtz Azari and I were doing our master’s theses and felt there was a gap in support for children and adolescents with ADHD. We thought it could be interesting to see how technology could help support these children. Everyone is different, and everyone needs different tools to thrive. Since then, of course, the idea has evolved. Most of our users now are grownups, and 95% of our users are on iOS.

Tiimo has gone through a few major updates. Can you tell us about them?

Mikkelsen: When I joined the team in 2019, we decided to rewrite Tiimo from scratch in UIKit, because that’s where my expertise was. This was right around the time SwiftUI was introduced, and though it wasn’t quite mature enough for our needs, we always kept an eye on it. With every new feature, we’d stop and think, “Could we write this in SwiftUI?”

When did you decide to make the switch to SwiftUI?

Mikkelsen: I think everyone knew that day would come. (Laughs) You get so much out of the box from SwiftUI in terms of accessibility, animations, transitions, and so on.

As a developer, you always want to build with the new stuff and keep the minimum iOS target as high as possible. But your work also needs to make sense for the business. We can’t spend three months rewriting something just to make it look exactly the same in SwiftUI.

So it was more than a technical upgrade.

Nørlem: As the cofounder — and not a developer — my goal is to improve the product. At some point, we came to the conclusion that moving to SwiftUI would not only simplify the code, but also make it easier to develop new features going forward.

Mikkelsen: So our approach was to talk to the designers, look at the upcoming features in the roadmap, and say, “OK, if we write this in SwiftUI, how efficient would it be, and could we benefit from it later?”

So it was less about, “We’re going to rewrite this in SwiftUI,” and more about taking the natural next step in the app’s life cycle. The designers felt SwiftUI would improve the product by adding nice transitions and animations. From the developer side, we knew the app would become much easier to build, have fewer crashes, and be compatible on all devices. So I felt like the whole team was engaged because everyone saw a benefit to making the switch.

Can you give a specific example of a SwiftUI benefit that appealed to you?

Mikkelsen: You can just do way more with less code. It always surprises me how fast you can get to 80% of a feature really quickly in SwiftUI because you already have all these components.

Sometimes it’s easier to build a prototype right in SwiftUI. The ability to quickly see something live in the preview makes it super-easy to get design feedback, for example. I’ve had our designer sitting next to me saying, “Maybe add a little more shadow here,” or, “What if we switch this shape to something else?” And I can do that without building the app because it runs in preview.

What other APIs have you been working with?

Nørlem: We decided about a year ago to integrate with the State of Mind API. We talk so much about productivity, but Tiimo is also very much about connecting that to mental well-being, about being aware of your feelings and energy levels. A lot of us think about, “Am I better in the morning or the evening?” And this API helps us take that a level deeper and offer a more holistic approach to understanding yourself and what schedule works for you.

Originally published June 9, 2025