Snore Timeline vs Pillow: Watch Tracking, Audio and Privacy

At a glance

Price

Pillow costs nothing to download. Of the five in-app purchases on its App Store listing, Premium Sleep Tracking costs $39.99, and Pillow Premium comes in at $19.99 monthly, $59.99 quarterly and $39.99 annual. The subscription notes mention a free trial where one is offered. Cancel 24 hours before it ends, or it renews into a paid plan.

Premium covers a lot. The listing puts sound recordings, heart rate analysis, advanced sleep analysis, sleep trends and Apple Health comparison, sleep notes, nap modes, the sleep aid library, wake-up melodies, CSV export, Smart Wake-up and unlimited history behind it. If hearing your snoring is the point, plan on Premium.

Snore Timeline has no subscription and no locked tier. You won't find an in-app purchase anywhere in it. Snore Nudge, Smart Wake Up Alarm, sleep stages, the sleep score, remedy tracking, weekly trends and full export all come in the same download, and Snoring apps with no subscription lists the other apps in this group.

Privacy

Apple has developers fill in a privacy label for every App Store listing, declaring what the app and its partners collect and whether that data links to your identity. It's a self-declaration. It records what a developer says it collects, and it doesn't prove where the data goes.

Both labels, as they stood that day, look like this.

Tap the App Privacy heading on Pillow's listing and it names the items. Linked to you are Device ID, Product Interaction and Crash Data, for analytics and app functionality, while Purchase History, Coarse Location and User ID aren't linked and serve the same two purposes. Customer Support, also not linked, is there for app functionality. The label declares no Health & Fitness data and no Audio Data.

Pillow's site makes strong on-device claims of its own. It says your sleep data stays on your devices, iCloud backup uses your personal iCloud storage, and you can use the app without an account. Its snore article adds that audio recordings stay on your device and that Pillow never has access to them. I'd read the label and the site together, since the label covers identifiers, app usage, crash data, purchases, coarse location and support requests.

Snore Timeline's label reads Data Not Collected. There's no account, no server and no analytics SDK. Audio analysis runs on the phone, and recordings stay in the app's storage until you export them. Of the 14 snoring apps I checked, four declare Data Not Collected, and Snore Timeline is the one of those four with no purchases of any kind. See every label side by side in the full 14-app label comparison.

With and without an Apple Watch

Pillow is built around the Watch, and that's where it's strongest. Its help article on tracking methods lays out four modes. In automatic mode, you wear the Watch to bed and Pillow detects the session with no input from you, then reports sleep stages, heart rate, heart rate dip, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, sleep temperature and Environmental Audio Levels. It can't ring an alarm, and it can't detect snoring or other sleep sounds.

Snoring needs a manual session that you start on the iPhone. According to Pillow's article, that iPhone-only mode gives you sleep stage analysis, Smart Wake-up and audio recordings, and drops heart rate, blood oxygen and respiratory rate. For those stages, Pillow's help center says the phone goes face down on the mattress near your body, where it reads motion from the accelerometer and gyroscope, and Pillow calls that less accurate than the Watch. Put the phone on the nightstand instead and an iPhone-only session gives no sleep stage analysis. A combined mode, started from the Watch with both apps open, unlocks most features, and a Watch-only mode needs no iPhone at all. The listing adds a report on the Watch face and complications.

Snore Timeline

Snore Timeline listens through the phone, and no audio feature needs a Watch. Sleep stages come from the recording itself: after a 15-minute baseline, the app estimates Awake, Light, Deep and REM from how regular your breathing is, with the phone on your nightstand and no wearable or Apple Health needed. On the nightly summary, the snoring chart switches between loudness and snores per minute, and a band of your sleep stages runs underneath it, so you can see whether snoring clusters in light, deep or REM sleep. Tap the hypnogram and the snoring chart marks the same moment.

Add an Apple Watch and you get heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen and wrist temperature beside the snoring, and the bundled Watch app shows live heart rate and HRV while you record. It taps your wrist for Snore Nudge and a silent alarm, and Garmin, Fitbit, Huawei and other watches that show iPhone notifications get the same taps. It can stop a recording, but starting one happens on the iPhone. Sleep and biometric data from Apple Watch, Oura, Garmin, Whoop and Ultrahuman comes in through Apple Health and feeds the sleep score, recovery score and hypnogram. When a night has stages from several sources, each one keeps its own timeline so you can compare them side by side. Setup is in the Apple Watch and Health guide, and Does Apple Watch track snoring? covers what the Watch measures by itself.

What each records overnight

Pillow

In a manual session with Audio Recordings turned on, Pillow's snore article says the app uses the iPhone microphone to pick up sounds through the night. Its help center adds that it skips sounds that are too short or seem insignificant, to save storage. An on-device model sorts what it keeps into snoring, sleep talking, coughing and other noises. Next morning the clips show up in an Audio tab, where you can play them, re-categorize them, mark favorites, delete them or export them. Trends adds a snoring section by week, month and year. With audio on, Pillow recommends charging the phone overnight.

Pillow's sleep quality index draws on body motion and the noise level the microphone picks up, per its help center. Sleep notes and wake-up mood tracking are there for spotting what affects your nights, and both are Premium.

Snore Timeline

Snore Timeline records all night through the phone microphone, AirPods or another Bluetooth mic, and it detects snores, gasps, coughs, sleep talking and breathing as they happen, with no periodic sampling. Every sound lands on a zoomable timeline, colored by type. Tap a point and you'll hear it. Snores group into episodes, and a 30-second gap ends one. Each episode shows duration, snore count, peak and average dB, a rhythm class and a plain-English summary. Episodes and events explains each field.

While you sleep, Snore Nudge can play a sound, vibrate the iPhone or tap your wrist when you snore, in any mix you choose, with the sound one step louder each time a nudge doesn't help. In the morning, the sleep score rates the night from 0 to 100, and snoring and breathing disruptions count against it. To test a remedy, tag the night with any of 23 built-in sleep factors, such as Mouth Guard, Nasal Strips or Slept on Side, or one you create. Once you have 5 recorded nights, the app compares them and ranks what helped. Each factor gets a result after 3 recorded nights with it and 3 without. The test a remedy guide walks through it.

Breathing pauses and sleep talking

Pillow's App Store description lists sleep apnea among the audio events it records, next to snoring and sleep talking. Its help center is more careful. It says Pillow is not a medical device and can't detect sleep apnea, that audio recordings may catch snoring, gasping or pauses in breathing, and that respiratory rate comes from the Apple Watch.

Snore Timeline publishes the rule it uses. It waits for a minute or more of audible breathing, then listens for a silence of 10 seconds or longer, and then for whatever ends that silence, whether it's a loud snore, a gasp or a breath. When all three line up, the timeline marks a breathing disruption. That flag comes from audio alone. It reads no oxygen level and makes no medical judgment. NHLBI describes sleep apnea as breathing that stops and restarts many times during sleep, and points to a sleep study as the way a provider confirms it. A flagged pause is a clip to play for a doctor, nothing more. Placement matters, and Breathing disruptions covers it: 1 to 2 feet from your head for pauses, 3 to 4 feet for snoring.

Sleep talking shows up in both. Snore Timeline counts it inside each episode and in the CSV, and each clip plays from the timeline.

Export and data ownership

Pillow's help center says you can export your database as a .txt file for free, and as a CSV file with Premium, with sleep quality, start and end times, time in each stage, the number of sounds recorded and wake-up mood. Audio recordings go out by email or another share option. Its site says you can export and delete data from the device and from iCloud.

Each night, Snore Timeline exports two CSV files, a Nightly Summary and a per-episode file, plus episode clips and the full-night audio, to the Files app. From there you can AirDrop, email or message them. None of it needs a purchase. The export guide lists every column. Doctor-ready data covers bundling a week of nights for an appointment.

Which one to pick

Pick Pillow if

• You wear an Apple Watch to bed and want tracking that starts on its own. Pillow's automatic mode reads heart rate, heart rate dip, blood oxygen, respiratory rate and sleep temperature, and its Watch app can track a night with no iPhone at all.
• You'd like help falling asleep. Pillow has meditations, bedtime stories, soundscapes and music, plus nap presets, mood tracking and a personal sleep program.
• You put weight on a long track record. Pillow has been on the App Store since 2014 and has 96K ratings there, plus an Editors' Choice badge. Snore Timeline arrived in September 2025, and I build it alone with no outside funding and no marketing budget, so its 281 ratings come from a much shorter run.

Pick Snore Timeline if

• You want every sound of the night kept, on a timeline you can replay, at no cost. Pillow's sound recordings are Premium [1], and it skips sounds that are too short or seem insignificant [10].
• You want sleep stages without a watch and without a phone in your bed. Snore Timeline estimates them from the recording and draws them under your snoring. Pillow's iPhone-only stages need the phone on the mattress [12].
• You wear an Apple Watch and want audio recorded the same night with no extra steps. Pillow's automatic Watch mode records no audio [5].
• You want a smart alarm without paying. Pillow's Smart Wake-up is Premium [1].
• You want to test remedies for free. Snore Timeline ranks what helped across 23 built-in sleep factors and your own, and Pillow's sleep notes are Premium [8].
• You're on Android. Pillow runs on Apple devices only [3].
• You want CSV files and the full-night audio at no cost. Pillow's CSV export is Premium [13].
• You want an App Store label that reads Data Not Collected.

Nothing stops you from running both. Pillow's automatic Watch mode records no audio, so the two won't fight over the microphone.

Frequently asked questions