What the app listens for, what the gray-blue markers mean, and how to read the numbers.
Snore Timeline listens for pauses in your breathing using your phone's microphone. When it hears steady breathing fall into extended silence and then break with a recovery sound, it logs a breathing disruption. This page explains the exact conditions behind each flag, how disruptions show up on your timeline and summary, and where acoustic detection reaches its limits.
A breathing disruption is a specific acoustic pattern: audible breathing, followed by extended silence, followed by a recovery sound. The pattern may indicate a pause in breathing during sleep, which is why the app surfaces it as its own event type rather than folding it into snoring.
Each disruption gets logged with its timestamp, how long the silence lasted, and how strong the recovery breath was. The app also grades each event by silence duration: under 12 seconds counts as mild, 12 to 20 seconds as moderate, and over 20 seconds as severe. Your nightly summary highlights the single longest pause of the night with its own severity rating, so one long event stands out even on a night with few disruptions.
The app flags a disruption only when three conditions occur in sequence:
The strictness is the point. Each condition rules out a different false alarm: the baseline rules out inaudible breathers, the 10-second floor rules out ordinary gaps, and the recovery requirement rules out silence caused by rolling away from the phone. The trade-off runs in one direction: when the app errs, it errs by missing events, not by inventing them. The section on quiet breathers covers what that means for your counts, and How Detection Works explains the decibel measurements behind condition three.
Breathing disruptions appear as subtle gray-blue markers on your timeline. The muted color keeps them visible without competing with snoring episodes, so you can scan a whole night and spot clusters at a glance. Disruptions that pile up in one stretch of the night tell a different story than the same count spread evenly.
You can also tap a breathing disruption event in your nightly summary to jump straight to that moment on the timeline and listen to the recording. Hearing the silence end in a gasp carries more weight than reading a number, and the audio is what makes the data worth sharing with a doctor.
Disruptions per hour is the primary metric. The app divides your detected disruptions by your hours of sleep and rates the result: fewer than 1 per hour is Minimal, 1 to 3 is Mild, 3 to 5 is Notable, and more than 5 is Significant. Each level comes with a short summary message and a color indicator. Because acoustic detection only captures audible events, even low numbers may deserve attention, and a higher rate may be worth raising with a healthcare provider. The rate is not a medical score.
Recovery breath strength appears as a decibel value like +16 dB, meaning the recovery sound measured 16 decibels louder than the silence right before it. A higher number means a more forceful recovery, which may suggest the body worked harder to restore airflow. Your summary shows the peak recovery strength of the night.
The nightly assessment needs at least 2 hours of sleep to calculate. If your recording ran shorter than that, or the app did not capture enough audible breathing to work from, the assessment stays hidden for that night. A full night with the phone close by gives it the data it needs.
Your summary can also show:
Breathing disruptions also feed your sleep score. Detected snoring and disruptions sit among the factors that can lower it, alongside sleep duration, deep and REM sleep, efficiency, and awakenings. The breathing section gives you the detailed view of disruption activity; the score reflects overall sleep quality. Disruption counts appear in your Weekly Summary and factor comparison cards too, and the "How does this work?" button in the app's breathing section opens a full explanation of detection and its limits.
The app tracks gasps separately from breathing disruptions, and the distinction matters. A gasp is a single sound: a sudden, forceful inhalation that may follow a pause and can indicate the body struggling to restore airflow. A breathing disruption is the full three-part pattern of baseline breathing, a silent gap of 10 seconds or more, and a recovery sound. A gasp can occur without the pattern around it, so the two counts diverge. Gasps report as a total count and per-hour rate; disruptions report as disruptions per hour. They appear as distinct items on your nightly summary, and Episodes & Events covers gasps alongside the other event types.
Detection works entirely by listening, so it depends on hearing both your breathing and the recovery sound. Quiet breathing, soft CPAP equipment, or a phone placed too far away can make detection less reliable, and quiet disruptions may go unrecorded. Remember the first condition: the app needs a full minute of consistent audible breathing before it starts watching for a pause. If your breathing stays barely audible through the night, the baseline never forms and the app undercounts or misses events.
Expect the count to underestimate the true number of events. Acoustic detection misses:
Treat the count as a conservative estimate rather than a complete record, and use it for tracking trends night to night. A rising or falling rate across weeks carries more meaning than any single night's total.
For the best chance of detection, keep your phone about 1 to 2 feet away and the room quiet. The placement guide covers the setup in detail.
This is audio analysis only, not a medical device. Snore Timeline cannot diagnose sleep apnea or any other medical condition. It measures sound patterns, not blood oxygen, airflow, chest movement, or brain activity, which are key factors in a professional sleep assessment. If you notice frequent breathing disruptions, or you experience daytime sleepiness, morning headaches, or a partner reports pauses in your breathing, discuss the results with a healthcare professional.
The results work well as a conversation starter. The Doctor-Ready Data guide shows how to turn your recordings into something a doctor can use, and Export & Sharing covers the report and audio files you can bring to an appointment. Everything stays on your device until you choose to share it; see the Privacy Policy.
