Sleep Cycle - Tracker & Sounds

I have loved this app for quite some time. I love the wake-up window that helps me ease out of sleep at just the right time, instead of a regular alarm going off in the deepest part of my sleep and leaving me groggy. There is a traditional alarm function and a “no alarm” function as well, which is nice. I also loved the insights about my stages of sleep throughout the night, and being able to look at how my sleep quality affected the way I felt in the morning. Sadly, this is now a premium feature. The first feature to go from free to premium was recordings of sleep sounds. That one I didn’t miss so much, though it was interesting to hear my sleep talking. Not being able to see my sleep stages is a significantly bigger hit. It seems that all good things ultimately get monetized, but I wish there had been some notice that a major feature like that was being taken away. For now, I will not be subscribing to a paid version, and will just have to enjoy the remaining features I love until those too are gone. Tracking my sleep regularity and overall sleep quality is still available - for now.

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.

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.