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.

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.

EDIT: I'm now going back to four stars. The fact that the Sleep Aid "feature" can not be disabled is ridiculous. It has started playing randomly in the middle of the night and scares my wife and I to death. There really needs to be a way to disable it altogether as I literally never use it... Update: Sleep Cycle reached out to me promptly after this review. After contacting support, I'm not having issues with the crashing anymore! Back to 5 stars. I left a five star review in the past, but I have to change that because of the most recent update. Ever since that update, the app is not doing exactly is purpose: waking me up. Why you ask? Because it crashes in the middle of the night. I've been late to work twice because of this now I've now been setting the standard iPhone alarm on top of this app and when I wake up in the morning, Sleep Cycle is closed. I've still been setting it every night just to be sure, and sure enough, every morning it's closed. If and when this is fixed, it's easily a 5 star app.