Snore Nudge: A Sound, Buzz, or Tap When You Snore

What Snore Nudge does

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, your iPhone vibrates, 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.

Sound, vibration, or wrist tap

Snore Nudge works on any iPhone, with or without a watch. Three buttons under Nudge with in Settings decide how the nudge reaches you, and you can turn on any mix of them:

• Sound. Your iPhone plays a tone.
• Vibrate. Your iPhone buzzes and makes no sound. It works with the phone locked on the nightstand, so you get a silent nudge with no watch at all.
• Wrist tap. Your watch taps your wrist and your iPhone stays quiet, so a partner isn't disturbed. This button appears when an Apple Watch is paired or you've set up another watch.

Whatever you turn on fires at the same moment, and one button always stays on. A caption under the buttons spells out the result, for example "Silent: your iPhone vibrates and your watch taps your wrist at the same time." With a watch paired, a new setup starts on Wrist tap. Without one, it starts on Sound. If you had picked Both in an earlier version, you now have Sound and Wrist tap on, which does the same thing.

The tone plays for 8 seconds by default and fades in, so it starts soft. To change the length, set Ringing duration under Snore Nudge in Settings, anywhere from 2 to 20 seconds. A short ring is a gentle prompt, and a longer one helps if you tend to sleep through it. The same slider sets how long the phone vibrates, and it's labeled Vibration duration when Vibrate is the only button on. If a nudge doesn't help, the next one is a step louder, and a nudge that works brings it back down. If your iPhone's media volume sits below half, the app raises it to half while the tone plays and puts it back afterward, so a phone left on low still gets through. Above half, the app leaves your volume alone. You pick the tone from the same list as the wake-up alarm, chosen separately: five built-in sounds, with Pulse as the default, plus any custom sounds you've added.

Three things stop the tone and the vibration 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. Other watches get the taps the same way, through their own apps. Wrist taps on other watches covers the setup.

Turning it on

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 buttons and the sound picker sit right under it. Turning on Wrist tap asks for notification permission if the app doesn't have it yet, since the taps are delivered as mirrored notifications. Sound and Vibrate need no permission. A change to Vibrate takes effect when the next recording starts, so set it before bed.

Use Test Nudge to hear or feel it before you give it a night. With Sound on, the tone plays through the speaker, and if a recording is running it plays at exactly the level you'd get tonight. With Vibrate on, the phone buzzes and the button reads Vibrating now. With Wrist tap on, 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.

If the test vibration doesn't come through, tap Didn't feel anything? under the button. Two iPhone settings can block an app's vibration, and both need to be set:

• Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Haptics: Always Play.
• Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Vibration: on.

If your iPhone's volume is low when a recording starts with Sound on, the app says so at the start of the recording and next to the Test Nudge button. The warning in Settings updates as you press the volume buttons, so you can watch it clear. The app lifts the volume to half for each tone on its own, so this is a heads-up rather than something you have to fix. If half is too quiet to wake you from the nightstand, turn the volume up before bed.

Wrist taps on other watches

Wrist taps don't need an Apple Watch. Most watches that show your iPhone's notifications can deliver them, because Snore Timeline sends each wrist nudge as a short burst of time-sensitive iPhone notifications and your watch taps your wrist when it shows one. The wake-up alarm's wrist nudge works the same way.

When no Apple Watch is paired, Settings shows a Not Using an Apple Watch? row under Snore Nudge and under Sleep Schedule > Wake Up. Tap it and pick your watch in Choose Your Watch. If your watch already writes sleep data to Apple Health, it sits at the top under Found in Apple Health. The app can't see the watch itself, so your pick only decides which setup steps you get. Current Samsung Galaxy Watch models and Pixel Watch don't pair with an iPhone, and an Oura Ring can't vibrate, so they can't deliver the taps.

Every watch needs the same five steps:

1. Set up Snore Timeline's notifications on the iPhone. In Settings > Notifications > Snore Timeline, turn on Allow Notifications, Time Sensitive Notifications, and Notification Center, and set Show Previews to Always or When Unlocked. Most watches only get notifications that reach Notification Center with a preview.
2. Let them through in the watch's own app. The table below shows where. Most of these apps need to stay running in the background.
3. Turn off the watch's Do Not Disturb and sleep mode at night, or set them to allow notifications. Otherwise the taps stay silent through your sleep hours.
4. Share notifications over Bluetooth. On your iPhone, open Settings > Bluetooth. If your watch is listed, tap the info button next to it and turn on Share System Notifications.
5. Test it. Tap Test Nudge, then lock your iPhone. The app sends three quick notifications. Some watches tap for each one, and others merge them into a single tap.

Several watch apps, including Garmin, Zepp, and Withings, only list an app after it has sent a notification. If Snore Timeline isn't in the list yet, tap Test Nudge once and look again. Withings may also need that first notification to arrive while its app is running before later ones come through.

If no tap arrives, tap Didn't feel anything? under Test Nudge. Start with the most common miss: lock your iPhone right after the test. Notifications stay on the iPhone while it's unlocked, so the watch never gets them. Then go back through the five steps above, and check your iPhone's Focus: turn off Sleep and Do Not Disturb, or allow Snore Timeline in them.

When the app nudges

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 loudness. A nudge that didn't work makes the next tone one step louder, up to three steps. A nudge that worked resets it to the softest step.
• The morning summary. Every nudge and its outcome go on the snoring chart, covered below.

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.

Reading the results in the morning

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." or "Your iPhone vibrated and your Apple Watch tapped your wrist." 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.

If you sleep through the nudges

Snore Nudge doesn't try to wake you. A nudge works when the snoring stops, and the best nudge is one you never remember: you roll over and sleep on. Sleeping through the night doesn't mean the feature failed. Check the verdicts on the snoring chart instead. Effective or Stopped snoring for 2 min means the nudge did its job while you slept.

The verdict to watch for is Snored through. It means the nudge never reached you. Wrist taps are easier to sleep through than the tone, and once you're deeply asleep you may stop feeling them at all. I sleep through mine. The taps also stay the same strength all night, because watchOS sets it. The tone climbs instead: each one that doesn't help plays a step louder, up to three steps.

If your mornings show a run of Snored through on wrist nudges, try these:

• Turn on Sound next to Wrist tap. The tone reaches you when the taps don't, and it gets louder until the snoring stops. If a sound would wake your partner, turn on Vibrate instead for a second, silent signal from the nightstand.
• Set the watch's haptics to Prominent. On an Apple Watch, it's the strongest tap watchOS allows. The tip above shows where.
• Lengthen the tone. Raise Ringing duration toward 20 seconds so the tone plays long enough to register.
• Turn your iPhone's volume up before bed. The app only lifts it to half, which can be too quiet from across the room.

Good to know

• Snore detection has to be on, since nudges are a response to live detection. Everything runs on the device as usual, and nudging doesn't add any new data collection.
• For wrist taps, the watch has to be on your wrist. iOS only delivers the taps to a worn watch, and a worn watch stays unlocked on its own with wrist detection on, which is the default. A watch left on the charger still counts as paired, so on a Wrist tap setting no nudge arrives at all. On nights you sleep without it, turn on Sound or Vibrate.
• Check your Sleep Focus. The taps and the Stop Sound notification are time-sensitive notifications, which Sleep Focus allows by default, but a custom Focus that blocks them will block the taps too. The tone and the vibration aren't notifications, so Focus doesn't mute them, and the silent switch doesn't mute the tone.
• Mind where the sound goes. The tone follows the recording's audio route. Recording through AirPods puts it in the AirPods, and a Bluetooth speaker connected to your iPhone can end up playing it. Test Nudge during a recording is the way to find out where it lands.
• Position nudging helps positional snorers most. If your snoring doesn't depend on position, expect the nudge verdicts to say so. Snore Nudge is a comfort feature. It isn't a treatment and makes no medical claims.