Sleep Cycle - Tracker & Sounds

I’ve been using this for years and it definitely helps me identify what things are helping me sleep by using the notes feature. I would love more control with the notes, though - as it is, you name it once and you can never change it. I also just have a giant list of all the notes I’ve made and it just gets bigger with no way to organize the notes into categories or folders. By “notes” I’m referring to things I created to track how they affect my sleep quality like “took melatonin” or “slept alone”, so over time the list just keeps growing as you add new sleep remedies or other things you realize may be affecting your sleep. Also, I love the slow wake up, it’s so much nicer than being jolted awake, but I hate that once the time you’re supposed to be awake arrives, you can’t go back to sleep or snooze the alarm. At that moment, if you fall back to sleep, you’re screwed, and since it won’t let you go back to sleep, it also stops tracking your sleep if you do go back to sleep. There’s a snooze button when you don’t use slow wake up, so why not have a snooze or “continue sleeping” option for the slow wake up? It would make my sleep data so much more accurate.

I have been using Sleep Cycle since the iphone 4. Until today the app contained a relatively unprocessed graph view of overnight activity. The most recent update changes these graphs, the replacement is more processed and is much more highly smoothed to highlight sleep stages. This change reduces utility of the app for individuals with disturbed sleep or other difficulties. This new graph substantially cuts the the ability to view more raw information about body activity during sleep. This loss seems particularly enhanced when using accelerometer mode, where the data in question is a more direct proxy _of_ body activity. (To the devs: I know this is like the XKCD where every change breaks some bull use case meme, I'm literally a dev myself, but the old graph _preserved information that is now lost_ - that's a data visualization bug. It happened to be useful to some people, and that use case Is _broad_ - anyone who looks at their sleep stages and thinks it might not track very well could easily see that recorded activity in the old graph and confirm/deny that extra overnight activity occurred. Hopefully a fix is as simple as adding a toggle for reducing a smoothing factor in the graph for people that desire it, a virtually zero-maintenance addition. Please spend some time trying to incorporate this and document the utility of retaining such a view. Maybe throw in a comment about how this is _particularly useful for sleep walkers and people with disturbed sleep patterns due to dissociative disorders and PTSD._)

This is the first sleep app I’ve tried with just my iPhone, as I don’t have an iPhone watch. I enjoy the variety of different types of relaxing music, sleep stories, and relaxing meditations, as well as the variety of gentle wake up tones and music. It gives you a graft of your sleep cycle, records and monitors of about 5 minutes of select snoring, coughing, some breathing inhales/exhales, sleep talking and ambient noise, then marks them for your review. You can then delete any recording, and/or can correct the label. (My phone had a hard time getting the relabeling to work, and it took a long time to figure out how to make my own label. I ended up using “other” or just deleted them) It then seems to train itself to leave out those recordings, for example cat purring. It also compares your sleep to others in your vicinity/nation. It has a map of areas near where coughing is heavy. It is educational, gives you daily/weekly/ monthly reviews, makes suggestions and has sleep related topics to read. There is also a place to ask questions. This seems to be a very comprehensive sleep app. I doubt there is a better one out there.