Pillow: Sleep Cycle Tracker 4+

Helped Me improve my sleep!

This app has helped me so much. I’m bipolar 2 and so l struggle with getting enough sleep. I started using Pillow to understand what was going on. While you can’t take it as gospel or a replacement for real medical tests (as the app even informs you), Pillow provides a lot of great insights, patterns, and data to help you understand your sleep habits. You have to keep in mind there’s not much the app can directly do to improve your sleep, but with sound recording, metrics on the types of sleep you’re getting, and the number of awakenings, you can start to address specific things about your bedtime habits.

I initially found I was consistently getting too much REM sleep and too little deep sleep. So I started looking at how I slept. I have the TV on when I fall asleep. It struck me that the blue light may have been keeping me up, so I set a sleep timer on the tv. I was immediately able to see the impact with better levels. Then I began taking a very small dose of melatonin. Again I saw even more sleep quality.

I’m still finding ways to improve my sleep and Pillow has helped me more than any other method. Try this app out. The premium is worth the money!

Great until it wasn’t

When I first got this app it was great. I was so happy to find a sleep tracking app that worked with Apple Watch and didn’t force you to pay just to track your sleep. The automatic sleep detection was absolutely awesome. I loved the interface. It was annoying how you had to buy the premium version to see your past sleep data, but not a deal breaker. But then one day the automatic sleep detection stopped working. I would wake up and eagerly check the Pillow app only to see that it didn’t collect any data. I thought it might be a problem with my Apple Watch so I went through all of the steps to make sure it was detecting my heart rate, had permission to collect data, etc. none of that worked. I turned off automatic sleep detection mode and put it to manual. And it worked! But as I was checking my sleep data in the morning I got a low battery alert on my phone. My phone that had been at 100% 7 hours before was now at 14% without me using it. I also quit all of my apps before going to bed. This also happened the next few nights I used manual mode. I can’t help but to think that that is the cause of the power drain. I don’t have a place to plug my phone in overnight where my phone can still be in range of my watch, so this is a problem for me. I’m going to try turning automatic sleep detection back on tonight to see if it detects anything/if it was just a glitch. Aside from that, the app is really great and I would really like to keep using it.

Developer Response ,

Hello! When you use Pillow with your iPhone, Pillow performs processor-intensive tasks that consume battery. To avoid any inconvenience we recommend that you keep your device on the charger during the night. Pillow on the Apple Watch consumes 0% battery if you have enabled "Automatic" mode or if you have selected "Sleep cycles" only. Please note, however, that if you are using WatchOS 5.x or older, the Apple Watch Pillow has an optional feature that can wake you up using haptic feedback (vibrations). To achieve that, Pillow uses a background audio mode (no audio is recorded if you have disabled audio recordings) that can consume a significant amount of battery . If you disable that feature then Pillow on the Apple Watch will consume almost 0% of the battery. To disable alarms with Apple Watch Haptics: Open Pillow on the Apple Watch > Scroll to the bottom > Tap on “Settings“ > De-select ‘Apple Watch Haptics’. Furthermore, if you have gone through all the suggested solutions on the following article and the issue persists, please contact our support team to assist you further: https://intercom.help/pillow_app/en/articles/3733534-insufficient-data-for-sleep-detection-or-pillow-couldn-t-detect-any-sleep-sessions . To contact support: Open Pillow on your iPhone › Tap on the Settings icon › Select ‘Helpdesk’