A tap on the wrist when you snore, so you change position without waking up.
Most position-based snoring eases when you shift off your back, but by definition you are asleep when it matters. Snore Nudge closes that loop: when the app hears you snoring live, your Apple Watch taps your wrist, gently enough to prompt a position change without pulling you fully awake. Every nudge is recorded with its outcome, so each morning you can see whether the taps actually quieted your night.
While a recording runs, the app listens for snoring the same way it always has. With Snore Nudge on, detection gains a response: the moment snoring is confirmed, your watch delivers a short burst of three gentle taps. The idea is old and well tested, an elbow from a partner, minus the partner and the resentment.
The taps arrive through Apple Watch notification mirroring, which means the whole system works with your iPhone locked on the nightstand and the watch app closed. You wear the watch to bed and that is the entire requirement. If the watch is in silent mode you feel the taps without any sound; with sound on, a soft chime accompanies them on the watch, never on the phone.
The app never fires a nudge before it believes you are asleep, never while your wake-up alarm is ringing, and never in the last stretch before your alarm time, when waking you would cost more than the snoring does.
Snore Nudge lives in Settings under Detection, beneath the snoring toggle it depends on, and it appears only when an Apple Watch is paired to your iPhone. It is off by default. Turning it on asks for notification permission if the app does not have it yet, since the taps are delivered as mirrored notifications.
Use Test Nudge to feel the pattern before committing a night to it: tap the button, lock your iPhone, and the test taps arrive on your wrist a few seconds later. A locked phone is the trick, since 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 per-tap strength comes from watchOS, so this single setting is the difference between subtle and unmissable.
Waking up cancels everything cleanly: dismissing a nudge notification on the watch, or simply unlocking your iPhone, clears any taps still queued.
A nudge system that taps at every snore would ruin the sleep it is trying to protect, so pacing is where most of the engineering lives. After each nudge, the app watches what happens next. The time you stay quiet afterward is the measure of success.
The messages on the watch follow the night's story: the first nudge of the night, a retry with a position suggestion, and a final attempt are all worded differently, so if you do surface enough to read one, it tells you where things stand.
Each morning, a night with nudges gets a Snore Nudges card in the nightly summary, collapsed to a count until you tap View Breakdown. The headline is the honest one: 10 Nudges · 3 slowed the snoring. Page through the nudges and each shows its time, how far into the night it fired, the snoring rate before and after, and an outcome chip like Stopped snoring for 3 min.
Below, a chart of snores per minute across the whole night marks every nudge, and a magnified panel zooms into the five minutes on either side of the selected one, with the nudge at the center and any waking marked, so you see the before and after directly. Under the chart, a plain-language story sums the evidence up, down to whether the tap woke you: "You stayed asleep through it, so the nudge cost you nothing."
Over a week or two this becomes a genuinely personal answer to whether position nudging works for you. Some people quiet down for an hour after a single tap; others sleep straight through 12 of them. The card shows which one you are, from your own nights.
