Twenty-six striking apps, and 2,327 reviews of them

What the word “free” is worth here

All twenty-six of these apps install for free. Apple prints Free on every one of them, which is why that word is the least useful thing on any of these listings. The number that means something is on the same page, further down, under In-App Purchases, and here it is for all twenty-six:

Twenty-three of the twenty-six have one. CombatMix asks $99.99 a year. Shadow Boxing, PunchLab and JAB AI ask $79.99. Boxing Training: Bag Workouts asks $59.99 a year or $129.99 once, for ever.

Three have nothing to buy at all, and two of those three are not really in the running: Precision Boxing Coach Lite has not been updated since August 2023, and ShadowBox has six ratings. The third is this app.

Those figures were read on 16 September 2026 from the App Store listings themselves and are in the table below. They move — a sale, a price change, a new tier — so check the listing before quoting one back at anybody.

The reviews are unambiguous about what that costs. Of the 2,327 reviews read, 175 mention the price, the subscription or the paywall — and 118 of those are negative. Of 237 one-star reviews, 148 are about money. It is the first cause of a one-star review and it beats everything else combined.

Read a few and you find it is not really about the amount. It is about not being able to see what you are buying:

STRIKR came out in April 2026 and sells the same thing as this app: a coach that calls strikes out loud. It had four written reviews when this corpus was pulled. All four are one star and three are about the paywall. Its listing says $6.99 a month and $29.99 a year — which is the reviewer's “$7 a month or $30 a year”, five months later, from an independent source. That is as close to a spot-check of this corpus as it gets.

The worst version of it is taking back what was given

Boxing Timer Pro Round Timer is fifteen years old, holds 6,749 ratings and a 4.85 average, and 82 of the 215 reviews we could read are one star. They all land on the 3.0.x versions, the ones where a one-time purchase became a subscription, and they are written by the oldest customers it has:

The same pattern, smaller, is in PunchLab's reviews and in Boxing Coach Workout Timer's. Charging money is not what produces the wave. Taking back what was already given is.

What breaks, counted

Every complaint written in those 2,327 reviews, grouped and counted. The second column is how many of those mentions sit in a review of three stars or less, which is the difference between a feature request and a reason someone stopped using it.

Written mentions across 2,327 reviews, not market shares.

The round that goes quiet

Thirty-one reviews describe a session stopping on its own, and it reads like one defect wearing four different names:

A coach that goes silent in round three is a coach you have lost, because nobody restarts a session. On iOS this is not bad luck: an app has to declare a playback audio session, keep an audio engine running through its own silence, and claim the background audio mode. A web page cannot do any of those. An app that was built as a web page wrapped in a shell inherits the defect and cannot patch it.

Your music, and the one request nobody answered

Twelve reviews are about music being cut or turned down, and twenty-four about volume. Read together they say one thing: people train to their own playlist and want the coach on top of it, not instead of it. The best five-star review in the corpus puts it first, ahead of the content:

And the mirror of it, from the app that gets this wrong hardest:

Eleven reviews across four apps then ask for the same missing knob, in almost the same words every time: a coach volume separate from the music volume. None of the four shipped it. It is the most repeated request in the corpus after the price, and the cheapest one on the list to satisfy.

The AI wave, and what it cost

About thirty of these apps came out in the last year and half of them have AI in the name. Four of them sell video analysis of your technique: Boxer AI, BRAWLER, JAB AI, SparPad Pro. Across their 111 reviews, 40 are one star — 36%. Shadow Boxing, which claims to see nothing at all, has three one-stars out of 507.

What breaks is never the price. It is that the looking does not happen:

An app that says it watched you train, without watching you train, gets taken apart inside a year. The one that promises nothing has lasted five.

The twenty-six, as Apple records them

Read from Apple's lookup API on 16 September 2026. Everything here is checkable by opening the listing. The two review columns are not comparable between rows: the App Store's public feed only returns reviews people actually wrote, and it returns them in a different depth per app, so 82 one-stars out of 215 read is a real signal about that app and a useless one for ranking it against another.

Prices and ratings from the United States storefront, read 16 September 2026. Where an app has several plans the dearest yearly one is shown. Reviews read 5 September 2026 across seven storefronts.

Three things the table says out loud

Nothing here is small. The median app on this list is 100 MB and five of them are over 200. Kickboxing Fitness Training is 287 MB. That is video: a library of filmed sessions, which is also what turns an app into a subscription and produces “already used all the boxing workouts, there is a big lack of fresh content”.

Six of the twenty-five have raised the floor. BRAWLER needs iOS 18. Boxing iTimer Lite and Boxing Coach Workout Timer need 17.6; Boxing Timer Pro, Shadow Boxing and Boxer AI need 17.0. An iPhone 8 runs none of those six. Combo Caller's floor is iOS 16.4, which is that phone and everything after it.

Two of them have stopped. Precision Boxing Coach Lite was last updated in August 2023 and sits at 3.8 stars. Muay Thai Fitness Workout, the only app holding the term in the US store, was last updated in November 2024.

The demand that has no supply

Thirteen reviews in this corpus ask for muay thai or for kicks. Not one of them is a negative review. They are happy customers of boxing apps asking for their own sport:

People are doing the work in their heads: taking a boxing call and adding the kick themselves. That is the gap this app was built into, and it is the only reason it exists.

Where Combo Caller sits, including what it does not do

It would be easy to end a page like this with a column of ticks. Here is the honest version, both halves.

One more limit, and it belongs on this page rather than in a footnote: the other twenty-five apps here have not been installed and run round by round. What is written above is what their listings publish and what their own customers wrote. Where a claim needed a hands-on test to be fair, it is not made.