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.

Until you've recorded a night of at least 3 hours, the main screen opens on Your first night. It checks microphone access, storage, and battery as you go, offers to turn on a bedtime reminder and connect Apple Health, suggests Sleep Focus, and ends with a Start recording button. Talk or snore near the phone once it's running to see it pick you up.

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.

The Tonight page

Open today's date before you've recorded and the nightly summary becomes a Tonight page. It changes through the day, and in the evening it's built to get you to bed with everything ready:

• A bedtime countdown. "Bedtime in 1h 20m", based on when you've usually gone to bed over the last two weeks. It isn't tied to the reminder time in Settings.
• Last night against your baseline. Time asleep and your other main numbers next to the median of the 28 nights before. Each number needs 3 earlier nights first, and until then it reads Building your baseline. Watch vitals only appear when something stood out, like blood oxygen dipping below 90%.
• The last 7 nights as a small bar chart of sleep or snoring, whichever moved more, with Show each night for the numbers behind it.
• Checks before you sleep, two at a time at most: microphone access, iPhone storage under 500 MB, battery under 50% and not charging, another app already playing audio, and notifications switched off while the bedtime reminder is on.
• Your bedtime reminder, the same setting as in Settings. Tapping the reminder notification starts that night's recording.

If a recording was interrupted in the last few nights, the page also suggests turning on Sleep Focus. Mic and storage problems move to the top at any hour, since either one would stop the night before it starts.

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. iOS does not let any app start listening on its own, so a session always begins with a tap in the app or a Shortcuts automation you set up. Snore Timeline keeps going in the background with the screen off, and on iPhones with a Dynamic Island the elapsed time and a Stop button sit up there all night. Music, podcasts, and sleep sounds can play alongside, started before or after you tap record.

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. If it can't, your Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, and home screen widget show a Resume Recording button, and a notification with sound follows 30 seconds later. 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.
• Plugging in, so a low battery can't end the night early.

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 18 or later, and on Android. If your iPhone is still on iOS 17, you can download the last version built for it, but new features need iOS 18. 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.