Getting Started

Your first recording

Open the app and tap the microphone button at the top of the screen. It's a green circle when idle. While recording it turns into a red stop button, and that same button is what you tap in the morning to stop.

The first time you record, iOS will ask for microphone permission. Allow it, or the record button stays grayed out. You'll also need around 500 MB of free space to start a session. If you're short, the app shows how many megabytes you have left and waits for you to clear some room before it starts.

A tour of the main screen

A recorded night fits on one screen, with the timeline up top and your nightly summary underneath. Step through each part below.

Once you have a night recorded, Timeline & Playback goes into reading the waveform, and Episodes & Events explains how the groupings work.

What the app detects

While you sleep, a sound classifier running on your phone listens for and labels a few kinds of sleep sounds:

• Snoring, the main event. Each one lands on the timeline with its volume, and snores close together get grouped into episodes.
• Gasps, sharp intakes of breath, which often come right after a breathing pause.
• Coughs, counted on their own, separate from snoring.
• Sleep talking: speech, whispers, and mumbling.
• Breathing, which the app uses to spot breathing disruptions and estimate sleep stages.
• Loud sounds, an optional setting that flags anything louder than your room's background noise, which it measures on its own. It's there for the sounds the classifier can't name, like teeth grinding, quiet mumbling, or you rolling over, so they still show up on the timeline.

All of this happens in real time on your phone. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere. How Detection Works goes into the classifier and the confidence thresholds behind each label.

Where to put your phone

Put the phone on the nightstand, about 1 to 2 feet from your head, plugged in and face-down. Each of those details does something:

• 1 to 2 feet away keeps sounds loud and clear. Breathing fades fast with distance, and the app needs to hear your breathing for disruption detection and sleep stages to work.
• Plugged in keeps the battery topped up. You can record on battery, but when power gets low iOS may close background apps, and the recording goes with them.
• Face-down switches off the Always-On Display on iPhones that have one, which roughly halves the overnight battery drain.

Quiet the room if you can. Fans, white noise machines, air purifiers, HVAC, an open window, a TV left on: all of them can drown out the breathing the app is listening for. Once the room's baseline goes above 45 dB, more sounds end up labeled Loud Sound instead of snoring.

Recording through the night

Start the recording, lock the phone, go to sleep. Snore Timeline keeps going in the background with the screen off. If a phone call or some other audio interruption stops the session, the app tries to pick back up on its own, several times if it has to. Switch microphones overnight, say to a Bluetooth device, and recording restarts on the new one.

Two things make a session more likely to survive the night:

• Sleep Focus or Do Not Disturb, so calls and alerts don't interrupt the recording.
• Closing other audio apps before you start, so nothing else grabs the microphone.

If a recording still cuts out, Troubleshooting lists the usual causes.

Make it a habit

The app gets more useful the more nights you record, and remembering to hit record every night is the hard part. A few things help:

• Bedtime reminder. Turn it on in Settings under Sleep Schedule and pick a time. The default is 10:00 PM. You get a notification each night, and tapping it opens the app ready to record.
• Recording Delay. If you'd rather not record yourself reading in bed, set a delay of up to 180 minutes, in 5-minute steps. The app counts down and starts listening when the timer runs out. Nothing during the delay is recorded.
• Siri and Shortcuts. Start a session by voice, or on a schedule you set up in the Shortcuts app. See Siri, Shortcuts & Widgets for the full list.

Requirements and permissions

Snore Timeline runs on iPhone with iOS 17.6 or later, and on Android. Microphone access is the only permission it needs to record. You'll be asked about Apple Health or Siri only if you turn those features on, and everything else works with the mic alone.

There's no account to create and no login. Everything runs on your device. The Privacy Policy has the details.