Comment 4 for bug 1427566

Well the issue with using the alarms backend for the timer use case is that,

1. They would appear in the indicator-datetime as an alarm. While we could filter out these special one-time alarms by tagging them as timers to ensure that they don't appear in the indicator it felt like a hack. Also the notifications shown for a timer would include the snooze button and show the actual time of the alarm say 10:30 AM rather than the timer duration 00:30 etc.

2. It also turns out the EDS is a convoluted mess and is not performant enough on the phone. So if you create a timer for 5 seconds, then by the time the alarms is added to the EDS backend followed by it appearing in the indicator-datetime, that 5 seconds would have already passed. At the moment, the SDK devs are creating a much simpler DBUS backend to fix these performance issues since using EDS for this purpose is an overkill.

Anyway the good news is that a simpler, clean API is in the works. Once that is done, the backend story would be much stronger IMO and also give 3rd party apps to create alarms and timers easily which at the moment is not possible since they require access to the EDS database which is restricted to the core apps like clock, calendar only.