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 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.

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._)

Overall it’s great. But it’s missing a few key options. 1- I want to play white noise ALL night. This app allows max 90mins IN the app. And if I play it outside the app, the alarm noise doesn’t work in the morning, instead it just increased my white noise app sound to disturbing and confusing levels. (Wasn’t sure what was happening so I kept turning it down every ten minutes until I opened my phone a few times later!! 2- Edit sleep time? Or “Go back to sleep” button? I sometimes choose to sleep longer after the alarm. How do I “go back to sleep” or edit my sleep log after it’s been recorded. Now the data is inaccurate and says I only slept 4hrs and woke up at 6am. When the reality is, the alarm was going on and off through my white noise sound for 30 mins and I was so frustrated, when I eventually turned it off I went back to sleep for an hour and a half. But I can’t edit my sleep log?

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.