 <p>on the first how did you run your App? I noticed that when i run an App in Debugmode, the Debugger eats 50% of the performance of my mobile Device. So if you just run your App the onFinish works much faster.</p> <p>A second point is to detect the timeout manually in the onTick Method an block the taps after some time with a boolean</p> <pre><code>private boolean tapBlock = false; private void beginTimer() { new CountDownTimer(10100, 1000) { public void onTick(long millisUntilFinished) { if (!tapBlock) { time.setText("Time: "+millisUntilFinished/1000); if (millisUntilFinished&lt;100) { tapBlock = true; } } } public void onFinish() { time.setText("Timeout!!!"); finalTap++; tapBlock = false; } }.start(); } </code></pre> <p>This is a bit around but its maybe faster and you have to add the "tapBlock" to the update method</p>