Snoring Apps That Flag Breathing Pauses and Their Limits (2026)

At a glance

What obstructive sleep apnea is, in one paragraph

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute describes sleep apnea as a common condition in which your breathing stops and restarts many times while you sleep. In the obstructive type, your upper airway becomes blocked many times during the night. In the central type, your brain does not send the signals needed to breathe. NHLBI lists breathing that starts and stops, frequent loud snoring and gasping for air as signs during sleep, and daytime sleepiness, dry mouth and headache as signs while awake. Untreated, it raises the risk of stroke, heart attack and other serious problems, and a provider may order a sleep study to find out which type you have and how serious it is [1][2]. Snoring alone does not mean you have it. Many people snore with no pauses at all.

What a microphone can and cannot hear

A phone app works from one signal: sound in the room. It can hear breathing get louder, go quiet and come back with a snort. It cannot tell why the room went quiet.

Silence is not the same as no airflow

A sleep study measures breathing itself. The Sleep Foundation describes polysomnography as monitoring brain waves, blood oxygen, heart rate and breathing through the night [3]. A microphone measures none of those. When your breath goes silent, the app sees a gap in the audio. That gap could be a pause in breathing. It could also be quiet breathing, a turn of the head away from the phone, or a blanket over your face.

Some events make no sound at all. Central apneas involve no breathing effort, so there is no struggle to hear. Partial blockages, the hypopneas that count toward a sleep study score, can reduce airflow without a clean silence. An audio app misses both.

Position and noise set the limits

• Distance. Breathing fades fast. Snore Timeline asks for the phone 1 to 2 feet from your head when you want breathing pauses, closer than the 3 to 4 feet it suggests for snoring.
• Your position. Rolling away from the phone can make breathing drop below what the mic picks up, which looks like silence.
• Room noise. A fan, white noise machine, air purifier or HVAC can cover breathing and cover the silence. Snore Timeline's guide notes the app may miss quiet events once a room sits above 45 dB at rest.
• A bed partner. A second sleeper's breathing can fill your silence, so a real pause may go unflagged.

These limits push the count in one direction. An audio app misses events more often than it invents them, so a low count is not proof that nothing happened.

How Snore Timeline flags a breathing disruption

Snore Timeline logs a breathing disruption when three things happen in order:

1. Audible breathing for at least 1 minute. The app checks twelve 5-second windows and needs breathing in at least 11 of them. That proves your breathing was loud enough to hear before it went quiet.
2. Silence for 10 seconds or more. Shorter gaps never qualify, which rules out the normal pause between breaths.
3. A recovery sound at least 15 dB louder than the silence. A gasp, a snort or a sudden loud breath has to end the silence. That separates a pause from you rolling away from the phone.

Each disruption appears as a gray-blue marker on your timeline. Tap one in the nightly summary to jump to that moment and listen. The app logs the time, how long the silence lasted and how strong the recovery breath was, and grades each silence by length: under 12 seconds is mild, 12 to 20 seconds moderate, over 20 seconds severe.

The summary also shows disruptions per hour of sleep, with its own bands from Minimal to Significant. That rate describes what the app heard. It is not a medical score and it is not an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). The nightly assessment needs at least 2 hours of sleep, and if the app never hears enough breathing to form a baseline, it stays hidden. The full rules, including how CPAP nights and quiet breathers affect the count, are on the Breathing Disruptions support page, and How Detection Works covers the decibel measurements.

We have not tested the breathing flag against a sleep study. Treat the count as a conservative estimate and watch the trend across nights. If you pair an Apple Watch that records blood oxygen, the summary can show time below 95% saturation and your lowest reading, which come from the watch through Apple Health.

What other apps offer

We describe each product below from its own App Store listing or its maker's support page. Purchases and privacy labels are developer self-declarations, as declared on the App Store on 27 September 2026. These listings and pages do not claim to diagnose sleep apnea.

SnoreLab

SnoreLab has 57K ratings on the US App Store and a long track record with its Snore Score and remedy tracking. Its App Store listing describes BreathFlow as a measure of breathing stability that analyzes sound patterns to detect indicators of irregular breathing, and a Breathing Rate feature that tracks your respiratory rate and identifies possible breathing interruptions. Both sit in SnoreLab Premium [4]. Its website defines breathing disturbances as temporary interruptions of breathing patterns during sleep. The listing states that SnoreLab is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose or treat sleep apnea. For a side-by-side view, see Snore Timeline vs SnoreLab.

Somnio+

Somnio+ appears on the App Store as "Sleep Apnea Detector - Somnio+". Its listing says it records sleep sounds and marks periods of prolonged silence without breathing sounds as potential breathing pauses. The same listing states that it is not a medical device and does not provide a medical diagnosis [5]. Its privacy label, like Snore Timeline's, reads Data Not Collected. It offers weekly and annual subscriptions from $4.99 to $29.99.

Snollo

Snollo's App Store listing says it classifies sounds on the device with Core ML and pulls sleep stages, heart rate and respiratory rate from an Apple Watch. The same listing mentions a breathing indicator in Sleep Sounds and blood oxygen trends from the watch. We found no description of a breathing pause flag in the listing, so we do not credit it with one.

Apple Watch sleep apnea notifications

Apple builds this feature into watchOS. Apple Support says the watch uses its accelerometer to look for breathing disturbances while you sleep. The watch classifies each night as Elevated or Not Elevated, analyzes the data every 30 days, and notifies you if you have Elevated breathing disturbances on a consistent basis. The feature is for people 18 or older who have not been diagnosed with sleep apnea, and Apple says it is not intended to diagnose, treat or aid in the management of sleep apnea [6]. Apple announced FDA 510(k) clearance for the notifications in September 2024 [7]. The watch does not record audio for this feature, so it complements a microphone. More on the watch in Does Apple Watch track snoring? and on the Apple Watch support page.

How accurate phone apps are

No published study we found tests any of the consumer apps above against a sleep study. The research tests lab algorithms running on phones, and the results depend on the method.

Narayan and colleagues placed an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S5 near the bed of 91 patients who were having a clinical sleep study. After building their sound algorithm on 32 patients, they tested it on 59 others. Their abstract reports a c-statistic of 0.87 for separating an AHI under 15 from an AHI over 15, compared with whole-night polysomnography. The authors conclude that phone-recorded sound can identify apnea and abnormal breathing, and call for future studies on screening [8].

Kim, Kim and Hwang pooled 11 studies of smartphone-based measurement, covering motion, sound, oximetry and combinations. For moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea (AHI above 15), their abstract reports pooled sensitivity of 0.9064 and specificity of 0.8801. The mean difference in AHI between phone and polysomnography was small, but the limits of agreement were wide, and the authors write that clinicians should be cautious when making clinical decisions based on these devices [9].

Two points follow. The pooled figures mix methods, so they do not describe a microphone-only app. And they concern moderate-to-severe cases, with an AHI above 15. An app that flags silences can prompt a conversation. It cannot give you the number a sleep study gives.

STOP-BANG and other screeners

STOP-Bang is a questionnaire. It started as the four-question STOP tool, published by Chung and colleagues in 2008 for surgical patients: Snoring, Tiredness during the day, Observed apnea, and high blood Pressure. Adding BMI, age, neck circumference and gender raised its sensitivity in the same study [10]. The result is eight yes-or-no items scored from 0 to 8.

A screener sorts people by risk. It does not measure your breathing. The 2008 study scored patients against the AHI from a monitored sleep study, which is the test. If your score is high, or a partner has seen you stop breathing, the next step is a clinician and a sleep study. A low score with loud snoring and gasping is still worth raising.

What to bring to a doctor

A doctor gets more from a pattern than from one night. Bring:

• Several nights of data. Record a handful of full nights with the phone 1 to 2 feet away in a quiet room. The Doctor-Ready Data guide walks through setup.
• The flagged times. The Detected Events export lists every disruption with its timestamp, silence length and recovery strength.
• Exported clips. A doctor who hears a silence end in a gasp learns more than a row of numbers shows. Export & Sharing covers the CSV files, per-episode clips and full-night audio.
• Partner observations. What a bed partner saw or heard, and on which nights, along with your own daytime sleepiness or morning headaches.

Say what the data is: phone audio that catches events loud enough to hear and tends to undercount. Everything stays on your phone until you share it.

Frequently asked questions