A short tone from your iPhone or a tap on your wrist when you snore, so you change position without waking up.
A lot of snoring eases up when you roll off your back. The problem is that you're asleep when it matters. With Snore Nudge, when the app hears you snoring live, your iPhone plays a short tone, or your Apple Watch taps your wrist, just enough to get you to shift position without waking you all the way up. Every nudge is logged with what happened next, so in the morning you can see whether the nudges quieted your night.
While a recording is running, the app listens for snoring the same way it always does. With Snore Nudge on, it also responds. The moment snoring is confirmed, your iPhone plays a short tone through its speaker, or your watch gives you a short burst of three gentle taps, depending on how you set it up. It's the elbow from a partner, without the partner.
The recording never stops for a nudge. The tone plays over it, the microphone keeps listening, and the app knows to ignore its own sound, so the tone can't show up as a snore, a loud sound, or an awakening. You can still hear it in the playback afterward, right where the nudge landed.
The app won't nudge while your wake-up alarm is ringing, and it won't nudge in the last 20 minutes before your alarm time, when waking you would cost more than the snoring does.
Snore Nudge works on any iPhone. Without a watch, the nudge is a sound. With an Apple Watch paired, a Nudge with picker in Settings gives you three choices:
The tone plays for 8 seconds and fades in, so it starts soft. If a nudge doesn't help, the next one is a step louder, and a nudge that works brings it back down. The app turns your iPhone's media volume up for those 8 seconds and puts it back afterward, so a phone left on low still gets through. You pick the tone from the same five sounds as the wake-up alarm, chosen separately, and Pulse is the default.
Three things stop the tone early. A Stop Sound button takes the place of the status line on the recording's Live Activity while the tone plays, and it works from the lock screen without unlocking. The nudge notification carries the same Stop Sound action. And picking up and unlocking your iPhone stops it too, since reaching for the phone is the response the nudge was asking for. Wrist taps are different: unlocking the phone leaves them alone.
The taps come through Apple Watch notification mirroring, so they work with your iPhone locked on the nightstand and the watch app closed. If the watch is in silent mode you feel the taps with no sound. With sound on, a soft chime goes with them on the watch.
Snore Nudge is in Settings under Detection, underneath the snoring toggle it depends on, and it shows up on every iPhone. It's off by default. The Nudge with picker and the sound picker sit right under it. Choosing a wrist mode asks for notification permission if the app doesn't have it yet, since the taps are delivered as mirrored notifications. Sound on its own needs no permission.
Use Test Nudge to hear or feel it before you give it a night. In a sound mode the tone plays through the speaker, and if a recording is running it plays at exactly the level you'd get tonight. In a wrist mode, tap the button, lock your iPhone, and the test taps arrive on your wrist a few seconds later. Locking the phone is the trick, because iOS only mirrors notifications to the watch while the phone is locked.
For firmer taps, open the Watch app on your iPhone and set Sounds & Haptics to Prominent. The strength of each tap is set by watchOS, so this one setting is the difference between subtle and impossible to miss. A Stronger Nudges shortcut to that setting sits under Snore Nudge whenever a wrist mode is selected.
If your iPhone's volume is low when a recording starts with a sound mode on, the app says so at the start of the recording and next to the Test Nudge button. It raises the volume for each tone on its own, so this is a heads-up rather than something you have to fix.
A single snore isn't enough. The app nudges when the snoring is sustained, meaning four snores inside a minute, or one snore the classifier is very confident about. From there it keeps nudging for as long as the snoring does. Each nudge finishes before the next one can start, which works out to one every 11 seconds at most, and there's no cap for the night.
After each nudge, the app watches what happens next. How long you stay quiet afterward is the measure of success, and it feeds two things:
The messages on the watch follow the night along. The first nudge and the retries are worded differently, with a position suggestion on the retry, so if you surface enough to read one, it tells you where things stand.
Every nudge is recorded with what happened next, and you review them the next morning on the snoring chart at the top of your nightly summary. On a night with nudges, the chart's key gets a row counting them, for example 9 Snore Nudges. Tap that row and a hairline marks each nudge across the night, so you can see whether the nudges landed in your loudest stretch or your quietest.
A pager steps through them one at a time, with the nudge and its time, like Nudge 9 of 10 · 4:46 AM, and a small speaker or watch glyph showing how it was delivered. Each one gets a verdict, from Stopped snoring for 2 min or Effective down through Slowed, Brief dip, Sped up, and Snored through. The timeline above follows the pager, so you can play the audio around any nudge and hear the result yourself.
Underneath, the app describes the nudge in plain words. It names the channel on the night's first nudge, like "Your iPhone played a short tone." Then how hard you were snoring going in, how long the quiet lasted, whether the rate fell or kept climbing over the next few minutes, and what the nudge cost you in wakefulness. That last part cuts both ways. A nudge that worked while you slept on gets "You stayed asleep through it, so the nudge cost you nothing." One that woke you gets "The quiet had a cost: you woke 40s after the nudge and were awake for 6 min."
The app won't claim a nudge woke you when all the timestamps show is that you woke after it. It reports what it measured and leaves the conclusion to you.
Over a week or two this adds up to a personal answer on whether position nudging works for you. Some people go quiet for an hour after a single nudge. Others snore straight through a whole run of them. Your own nights will tell you which you are.
