Getting Started

Your first recording

Open the app and tap the microphone button at the top of the screen. It sits on a green circle when idle and turns into a red stop button while recording. Tap the same button in the morning to stop.

Before your first recording, iOS asks for microphone permission. Allow it; the record button stays disabled until you do. You also need about 500 MB of free storage to start a session. If space runs low, the app tells you how many megabytes you have free and waits until you clear some room.

A tour of the main screen

Open a recorded night and the whole thing sits on one screen: the timeline up top, then your nightly summary below. Step through it one piece at a time.

Once you've recorded a night, the Timeline & Playback page covers reading the waveform in depth, and Episodes & Events explains the groupings you'll see.

What the app detects

While you sleep, on-device AI listens for and labels several kinds of sleep sounds:

• Snoring, the main event. Each detection lands on the timeline with its volume level, and snores close together group into episodes.
• Gasps, sudden intakes of breath that often follow a breathing pause.
• Coughs, tracked separately from snoring.
• Sleep talking: speech, whispers, and mumbling.
• Breathing, used to spot breathing disruptions and estimate sleep stages.
• Loud sounds, an optional setting that flags any noise above a threshold you set. It catches sounds the classifiers miss, like quiet mumbling, teeth grinding, or movement, so they still land on the timeline.

Every sound is processed in real time on your phone. Nothing is sampled, skipped, or uploaded. How Detection Works explains the classification and confidence thresholds behind each label.

Where to put your phone

Place the phone on a nightstand about 1 to 2 feet from your head, plugged in, face-down. Each part of that matters:

• 1 to 2 feet away captures sounds loud and clear. Breathing in particular fades fast with distance, and audible breathing is what powers disruption detection and sleep stages.
• Plugged in keeps the battery topped up. Overnight recording works on battery too, but iOS can close background apps when power runs low.
• Face-down turns off the Always-On Display on iPhones that have one, cutting overnight battery drain roughly in half.

Quiet the room where you can. Fans, white noise machines, air purifiers, HVAC, open windows, and a TV left on can mask the breathing patterns the app listens for. When the room sits above 45 dB at baseline, more sounds get labeled Loud Sound instead of snoring.

Recording through the night

Start the recording, lock the phone, and sleep. Snore Timeline keeps recording in the background with the screen off. If a phone call or another audio interruption stops the session, the app tries to resume on its own several times. If you switch microphones overnight, for example to a Bluetooth device, recording restarts on the new device.

Two settings protect the session:

• Sleep Focus or Do Not Disturb keeps calls and alerts from pausing the recording.
• Closing other audio apps before you start avoids competition for the microphone.

If a recording still cuts out overnight, Troubleshooting walks through the common causes.

Make it a habit

The app earns its keep over many nights, so it includes tools that take the remembering out of it:

• Bedtime reminder. Turn it on in Settings under Sleep Schedule and pick a time (it defaults to 10:00 PM). The app sends a daily notification, and tapping it opens the app ready to record.
• Recording Delay. If you don't want to capture yourself falling asleep, set a delay of up to 180 minutes in 5-minute steps. The app counts down and starts listening when the timer ends; audio during the delay is never recorded.
• Siri and Shortcuts. Start a session by voice or on a schedule you build in the Shortcuts app. Siri, Shortcuts & Widgets covers the full list.

Requirements and permissions

Snore Timeline runs on iPhone with iOS 17.6 or later, and on Android. The app asks for microphone access to capture audio; that's the only permission recording needs. Apple Health and Siri permissions come up only if you turn those features on, and the app records and analyzes fully with microphone access alone.

There are no accounts, no logins, and no cloud services. Everything runs on your device. The Privacy Policy covers the details.