Frequently Asked Questions
Search for an answer, or browse by topic.
No questions match . Try fewer or different words, or browse the support center.
About & privacy
What makes Snore Timeline different from other snore tracking apps?
Snore Timeline keeps the full night's audio and lays it on an interactive timeline you can scrub through and tap to hear. It records continuously instead of sampling, so a quiet hour shows up as a quiet hour. Coughs, gasps, sleep talking, and breathing pauses each get their own category, and sounds that happen close together are grouped into episodes you can play back.
Sleep stage data comes in from Apple Watch, Oura Ring, Whoop, Garmin, and Ultrahuman. Detection runs on your phone. No cloud, no account, no subscription.
Does Snore Timeline require a subscription?
No. Snore Timeline is free, with no subscription. Everything is included: breathing disruption detection, episode grouping, nightly summaries, and data export. There are no in-app purchases.
Is my data private?
Yes. All audio processing happens on your iPhone. There are no cloud uploads, no external servers, and no account. Your recordings stay on your device and nobody else can get at them. If you want to share data with a doctor, you export it yourself.
Recording & setup
Where should I place my phone while recording?
For snoring alone, 3 to 4 feet away works fine. If you want breathing disruption detection, put the phone 1 to 2 feet away, since it has to be able to hear you breathe. A nightstand next to the bed, plugged in, is the usual spot.
Which audio quality setting should I choose?
The quality settings are there to save storage. If space isn't a problem, use High Fidelity. Only drop to Basic (~8 MB/hour) or Standard (~15 MB/hour) if you need the room, since both trim the higher frequencies to shrink the file. If you want to hear yourself breathing in recordings you need High Fidelity (~25 MB/hour). Basic and Standard cut out the subtle frequencies where breathing sits.
Can I use it with AirPods or Bluetooth devices?
Yes. Snore Timeline works with Bluetooth audio devices including AirPods, so you can record through the night without running the phone's battery down.
You also pick which mic records. Choose iPhone Microphone in Settings and the phone records while your AirPods keep playing music at full quality, or Automatic to record through your headphones' mic whenever they're connected.
How much battery does it use?
Recording uses roughly 3 to 5 percent of battery per hour, depending on your iPhone. Over a full 8-hour night that adds up, so keep the phone plugged in while it records.
Can I start and stop recording with Siri?
Yes. Say “Hey Siri, start recording in Snore Timeline” or “Hey Siri, stop recording in Snore Timeline.” It's hands-free, which is handy at bedtime when the phone is already on the nightstand.
Detection & accuracy
How accurate is the snoring detection?
Snore Timeline uses Apple's sound classification to analyze your audio continuously through the night, in real time. There's no calibration or setup, and detection starts the moment you press record. The app identifies snoring, gasps, coughs, breathing, and sleep talking by looking at both the shape of each sound and its frequency makeup. All of the processing happens on your device.
How does the snoring app show episodes?
Snore Timeline groups snores that happen close together. When it hears snoring, it opens an episode. If there's no snoring for 30 seconds, that episode ends, and the next snore starts a new one. Each episode shows its duration, snore count, and a plain-English summary, so you can see when in the night you snored most.
Does it detect breathing pauses?
Yes. Snore Timeline listens for breathing pauses in your sleep audio. It looks for silent stretches of 10 seconds or more followed by a gasp or some other recovery sound, and marks those breathing disruptions on your timeline so you can see the pattern. This is audio analysis only. The app isn't a medical device, and if you're seeing pauses it's worth bringing them to a healthcare professional.
Why does background noise affect detection?
Snore Timeline classifies sounds by their acoustic profile. In a room where the baseline noise is above about 45 dB (a loud fan, a window AC, traffic), snores can get classified as Loud Sound events instead, because the raised noise floor changes how the sound comes through.
If you record in a noisy room, expect more events under Loud Sound. For the cleanest classification, keep the room quiet and put the phone close enough that your breathing stays audible.
Do I need to set a dB threshold for Loud Sound Detection?
Not unless you want to. Loud Sound Detection creates an episode whenever a sound rises above your room's background noise, and it's useful for catching sounds that are hard to classify, like whispers or mumbling that don't register as sleep talking. Snoring and sleep talking are detected on their own without it. By default the threshold is Automatic: the app measures your room's noise floor while you record, re-measures it every minute, and keeps the threshold just above what it hears, so a fan or an open window raises it and a quieter room lowers it. Settings shows the measured level and the dB it resolves to. If you'd rather choose a number, switch Threshold Mode to Fixed and set the dB level yourself.
Can it detect teeth grinding (bruxism)?
The sound classifier focuses on snoring and sleep talking, so it does not label teeth grinding (bruxism) as its own category. Turn on Loud Sound Detection and the app flags any sound louder than your room's background noise, which captures the noise of grinding and drops it on your timeline to play back and review. It records the sound and nothing more. If you grind often, mention it to a dentist.
Can it tell me what I said in my sleep?
Yes. Open a Sleep Talking episode and tap Transcribe, and the words appear under each clip. A speech model on your iPhone does the transcribing, so your recordings never leave the phone, and it works in airplane mode once the model is downloaded.
The first time, the app asks before a one-time download of the model, 574 MB on most recent iPhones. Clips with no clear words come back marked as unrecognizable instead of filled with invented sentences. Nights recorded in Basic quality can't be transcribed, so use Standard or High Fidelity if you want to read your sleep talk.
Sleep stages
How does Snore Timeline estimate sleep stages?
Snore Timeline listens to how regular your breathing is through the night, using the phone's microphone. About 15 minutes in, the algorithm has your personal breathing baseline. From there it sorts each period into Awake, Light Sleep, Deep Sleep, or REM using thresholds from published research. Steady, regular breathing suggests deep sleep, and irregular breathing points to REM. The algorithm also knows how a night is shaped, with deep sleep early and REM toward morning. Since the app only has audio to go on, stretches where your breathing is too soft to hear get labeled Silence and credited as restful sleep instead of guessed at. These are estimates from audio, and they aren't clinical measurements.
How accurate are the sleep stage estimates?
The estimates are based on published research into how breathing regularity relates to sleep stages. They give you a fair picture of your general sleep architecture and your trends over time. They haven't been validated against polysomnography (a clinical sleep study), so treat them as estimates. For a clinical sleep analysis, see a healthcare professional.
Research that stages sleep from a single physiological signal has reached roughly 70% agreement with polysomnography.
Does sleep stage detection require any special setup?
No. Stage estimation runs on its own from the same recording as snoring and breathing disruption detection. Put the phone 1 to 2 feet away on the nightstand and start recording. The algorithm needs about 15 minutes to work out your breathing baseline. For the most consistent results, put the phone in the same place each night.
Devices & Apple Health
Does Snore Timeline work with Apple Watch?
Yes. Snore Timeline includes an Apple Watch companion app bundled with the iOS app. From your wrist you can stop an in-progress recording with a tap, see live heart rate and HRV while you record, and check a morning sleep dashboard with your hypnogram and snore activity.
A Sleep Score complication shows last night's score on your watch face, and a Smart Stack widget brings the current recording's Live Activity onto the Watch. The Watch app is iOS only.
Can the app nudge me to stop snoring?
Yes, on any iPhone. Turn on Snore Nudge in Settings under Detection and when the app hears you snoring, your iPhone plays a short tone, which is usually enough to get you to shift position without fully waking. The recording keeps running through it. For a silent nudge that won't wake a partner, have the iPhone vibrate instead, or have your watch tap your wrist. That works on an Apple Watch and on most other watches that show iPhone notifications, including Garmin, Fitbit, and Huawei. Turn on any mix of the three.
The app keeps nudging for as long as the snoring does, a step louder each time a nudge doesn't help, and stays quiet in the last 20 minutes before your alarm. The next morning, the snoring chart in your nightly summary pages through every nudge with its outcome, so you find out whether position nudging quiets your snoring.
Snore Nudge doesn't wake me up. Is it working?
It may be. A nudge counts as working when the snoring stops, and it doesn't need to wake you to do that. Check the verdict for each nudge on the snoring chart in your nightly summary. Effective means the nudge worked while you slept.
If the verdicts say Snored through, the nudge didn't reach you. Wrist taps are the easiest to sleep through and stay the same strength all night, while the tone plays a step louder each time a nudge doesn't help. Turn on Sound next to Wrist tap under Nudge with so the tone backs up the taps, or Vibrate if a sound would wake your partner, and turn your iPhone's volume up before bed.
Can the alarm wake me gently, or without waking my partner?
Both. The Smart Wake Up Alarm gives you a window of 15, 30, or 45 minutes before your set time and rings when it finds you in light sleep, instead of pulling you out of deep sleep at the exact minute. If no good moment comes up, it rings at your set time as usual, and the alarm always fades in.
With a watch on your wrist, the wrist nudge delivers the alarm as gentle taps, alone for a fully silent wake or alongside the sound. It works on an Apple Watch and on most other watches that show iPhone notifications, like Garmin, Fitbit, and Huawei. Dismissing on the watch stops the alarm, the taps, and the recording together.
Does Snore Timeline integrate with Apple Health?
Yes. Snore Timeline reads from and writes to Apple Health.
Writes (all derived from your overnight audio, analyzed on-device):
- Sleep analysis (time asleep, time in bed) from continuous audio.
- Sleep stages (REM, deep, light, awake, silence) estimated from breathing regularity.
- Respiratory rate during sleep, counted from breath sounds.
Reads (measured by your wearable): sleep stages, heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen (SpO2), and wrist temperature from any HealthKit-compatible device.
When you first turn the integration on, the app imports your full sleep history from Apple Health, up to 2 years of nights, so your history is filled in from the start. Apple Health is encrypted local storage on your device. Nothing gets uploaded to a cloud.
Can I see my heart rate, HRV, and SpO2 alongside my snoring?
Yes. When you wear a HealthKit-compatible wearable overnight, Snore Timeline pulls those metrics into a nightly biometrics card showing your averages for breathing rate, heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, and wrist temperature.
Each metric gets a rating such as Excellent, Good, Typical, Low, or Elevated, plus an inline sparkline so you can see how it changed across the night. Resting heart rate and HRV earn Excellent when they clearly beat your own baseline. Breathing rate tops out at Typical. The ratings are informational and aren't a medical diagnosis.
Once a metric has 7 nights of history from the same device, its rating compares tonight with your median over the last 28 nights, and the card shows how far tonight sits from that baseline. Clinical limits still apply, so a reading outside the healthy adult range gets flagged either way. Blood oxygen keeps its 95 percent line and shows your usual value next to it.
Export & sharing
Where are my recordings saved?
Tap the download icon to open the Export Report sheet, pick a date range, and choose what to include: summaries, sleep stages, events, biometrics, and audio. For audio, turn on Include audio and pick Full-night recording for one file of the whole night or Per-episode clips for every episode. The report comes out as CSV files plus whatever audio you chose to bundle.
Exported files are saved to your device, organized into two folders:
On iPhone: open the Files app, tap Browse, choose On My iPhone, then open the Snore Timeline folder.
On Android: open the Files app, go to Downloads, then open Exported Recordings or Snoring Episodes.
Can I share my recordings with others?
Yes. Recordings are saved to your device and can also be shared anywhere via the share sheet: AirDrop, Messages, email, and more.
To share the full night, go to that night and tap the download icon at the top of the Snoring Episodes list to open Export Report. Turn on Include audio, choose Full-night recording, tap Generate Export, then Share Export. To share an individual episode, tap the download icon on any episode card to save it, then tap it again to open the share sheet.
How do I export a week or a month of data at once?
Open Export Report from the night you want to anchor on and choose a date range: Last 7 days, Last 30 days, or All time. Toggle which categories to include: Nightly Summary, Sleep Stages, Detected Events (snoring, sleep talking, coughs, gasps, breathing disruptions), and Watch Biometrics.
If you want audio, the app only pulls recordings for the night you're currently viewing, whatever date range you chose for the stats. It shows a size estimate before generating, then packages everything as one ZIP file you can share with a doctor, a sleep clinic, or anyone else.
Troubleshooting
Why did the app stop recording before morning?
This usually happens when iOS interrupts the app's audio session while it's running in the background. Anything that plays a sound (a phone call, an alarm from another app, some notifications) can cause an interruption. The app tries to resume on its own. If iOS won't let it restart, the Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, and widget show a Resume Recording button, and a notification with sound follows 30 seconds later, so you can pick the night back up with one tap.
Fix: Turn on Do Not Disturb or a Focus mode before you start recording. That blocks the calls and notification sounds that would interrupt the session. You can also turn on the Bedtime Recording Reminder so a one-tap notification starts your recording at the right time each night.
How do I restart the app?
Force-quit Snore Timeline, then reopen it. On iPhone, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause in the middle to open the App Switcher. On older iPhones with a Home button, double-tap Home instead. Swipe up on the Snore Timeline card to close it, then tap the icon on your Home Screen to relaunch and start a new recording.
Still stuck? Troubleshooting covers overnight recording issues, or get in touch.