This is the first sleep app I’ve tried with just my iPhone, as I don’t have an iPhone watch. I enjoy the variety of different types of relaxing music, sleep stories, and relaxing meditations, as well as the variety of gentle wake up tones and music. It gives you a graft of your sleep cycle, records and monitors of about 5 minutes of select snoring, coughing, some breathing inhales/exhales, sleep talking and ambient noise, then marks them for your review. You can then delete any recording, and/or can correct the label. (My phone had a hard time getting the relabeling to work, and it took a long time to figure out how to make my own label. I ended up using “other” or just deleted them) It then seems to train itself to leave out those recordings, for example cat purring. It also compares your sleep to others in your vicinity/nation. It has a map of areas near where coughing is heavy. It is educational, gives you daily/weekly/ monthly reviews, makes suggestions and has sleep related topics to read. There is also a place to ask questions. This seems to be a very comprehensive sleep app. I doubt there is a better one out there.

EDIT: I'm now going back to four stars. The fact that the Sleep Aid "feature" can not be disabled is ridiculous. It has started playing randomly in the middle of the night and scares my wife and I to death. There really needs to be a way to disable it altogether as I literally never use it... Update: Sleep Cycle reached out to me promptly after this review. After contacting support, I'm not having issues with the crashing anymore! Back to 5 stars.I left a five star review in the past, but I have to change that because of the most recent update. Ever since that update, the app is not doing exactly is purpose: waking me up. Why you ask? Because it crashes in the middle of the night. I've been late to work twice because of this now I've now been setting the standard iPhone alarm on top of this app and when I wake up in the morning, Sleep Cycle is closed. I've still been setting it every night just to be sure, and sure enough, every morning it's closed. If and when this is fixed, it's easily a 5 star app.

I have loved this app for quite some time. I love the wake-up window that helps me ease out of sleep at just the right time, instead of a regular alarm going off in the deepest part of my sleep and leaving me groggy. There is a traditional alarm function and a “no alarm” function as well, which is nice. I also loved the insights about my stages of sleep throughout the night, and being able to look at how my sleep quality affected the way I felt in the morning. Sadly, this is now a premium feature. The first feature to go from free to premium was recordings of sleep sounds. That one I didn’t miss so much, though it was interesting to hear my sleep talking. Not being able to see my sleep stages is a significantly bigger hit. It seems that all good things ultimately get monetized, but I wish there had been some notice that a major feature like that was being taken away. For now, I will not be subscribing to a paid version, and will just have to enjoy the remaining features I love until those too are gone. Tracking my sleep regularity and overall sleep quality is still available - for now.

Pretty shady business model. I paid for the “early adopter lifetime access” back when this app was getting off the ground. I thought it looked promising and had some good and promising features so I decided to take the risk and make the one-time purchase. I stopped using the app for quite awhile but really needed a sleep app again as I got older. I came back to this app and was initially excited to see the app appeared more polished and restored my lifetime access only to find that it is bogus. I get access to just the features the app had when i paid for it. Now maybe you think this is just fine. That I “got what I paid for” but I invested in this app. It wasn’t anything really special at the time and I decided I was going to sow in and get one sleep app that would continue to evolve and get better. I think it’s pretty shady that I help get the off the ground with my money and they now turn around and make me double down my payment.If I got to pay a premium subscription on top of my “lifetime” purchase I think I’ll just say good bye and warn people off cause you don’t know what they will pull next. Want my review down?? Let your early supporters in on all features you develop in the future… under the same “lifetime” access they rightfully paid for,

I’ve been finding it increasingly frustrating to discover an app that doesn’t immediately require a payment or subscription just to access its basic features. It feels like every app I try either locks essential tools behind a paywall or doesn’t even allow me to explore the interface without committing to a trial or purchase. I completely understand the need for developers to monetize their work, but it’s becoming excessive.There should be a better balance between offering free access and premium content. As a user, I would appreciate the opportunity to actually try out an app and determine whether it’s right for me before being asked to pay. Unfortunately, with many current apps, I can’t even get past the welcome screen without being prompted to subscribe, which creates a barrier to entry and diminishes the overall user experience.It’s disheartening to see how limited the options are for people who are looking for functional, creative tools—especially younger users, students, or hobbyists—without being immediately met with constant payment requests. I believe offering a genuinely free version, even if limited, would not only attract more users but also create goodwill and trust between developers and their audience.

As an early adopter, I truly believed in this app. So much so, I chose to pay the one-time fee to unlock all of its wonderful features. As time went on, it was so nice to see the app improve. Then…they switched to a subscription-based service. While I understand and fully support the time, energy, and resources required to maintain a successful product, it’s disheartening that my contribution and good faith in making a purchase was reduced to less access to the information I once had as a paid member. While I still enjoy the little bit that has been left available to me, I can only hope that they can recognize those who gave Sleep Cycle its start to help fund their success, which should be worth something, while they can benefit from subscriptions from new member who weren’t part of the early days. This is the only reason I give this 5-star product 4 stars…with the hope that they will not eventually remove all access from the early adopters.

I've used Sleep Cycle for more than ten years. I pay approximately $40 a year for the upgrade in order to keep and have access to my data. It used to be a good, solid way to keep track of every night's sleep and be able to compare them over the years. But the vendors have caved in to the temptation to make everything really fancy without adding useful features.A few of the problems:It is not possible to see the graphs in the horizontal format, which renders impossible reading any information from over a long period (e.g., ten years). It is not possible to compare two years, or five. One cannot choose the measurements to view. What used to be a straightforward, very informative graph of a night's sleep is now an appallingly tricked up mess of alarming colors, viewable only in the short format, not in horizontal mode. And not transferable to a bigger screen, such as a desktop. I have been assured that it is not possible to go back to the old graph.This was a wonderful app until they had delusions of grandeur and went fancy, instead of making their product more flexible and therefore more useful.

This used to be my favorite app, and I even subscribed for the premium service because it was so perfect in so many ways. It is still my favorite alarm clock because of the gentle way it wakes me, so kudos there! I’m going to keep using the app for that and that’ll keep 4 stars. However, the new sleep tracking part is absolutely not working. Since the recent change, there have been times when I’ve been awake for an hour or two, sometimes on my phone, and sometimes even talking to someone on my phone. But the app indicates that I am in a light sleep. Last week, the cat knocked a glass off my desk. I was awake, sweeping up broken glass, and talking to the cat to stay away as he was coming to check out what I was doing. The app picked up the sounds of me sweeping glass and talking, but still identified this as ‘“light sleep.” The previous tracking was significantly more accurate. What happened? It’s not really worth subscribing anymore. Hope it gets fixed soon!

I have been a user of Sleep Cycle for almost a decade. I love that it will wake you gently, even if I choose to snooze up to the time I set for my alarm. I use this in conjunction with a Bluetooth sleep mask with headphones embedded. This allows me to use an alarm without waking my wife. I can also use the sleep aid function without distracting her at night. This worked perfectly until a recent change: the alarm no longer plays through a Bluetooth device! It can only be played over the phone’s speaker. I say recent, but it has been about a year since this decision took effect. And it was a deliberate design choice the developers implemented. I continue to use it because, at least for the next few months, I will be a geo-bachelor, but once I return home I will find something else.Update: no indication that they will be restoring the Bluetooth alarm functionality any time soon. Too bad. If that were in place, I would go right back to five stars.

The app used to be quite accurate and reliable. An update in January 2025 caused the app to all of a sudden think it takes me two hours to fall asleep. I’m usually out within 10 to 15 minutes. You can clearly see my history showing that in January it all of a sudden spikes to taking one to two hours to fall asleep. Furthermore, and the absolute WORST part is the alarm is not reliable. The sleep analysis will continue but for some reason it will cancel the alarm as if you never set one. On its own it will just switch you over to the “sleep analysis only“ mode. Just a couple of days ago I had an alarm set for 8:15 AM and at 8:40 AM it had not gone off! Only this time, it didn’t switch modes… It still showed the alarm window on the screen but the alarm had not gone off!! As an airline pilot good quality sleep is critical and the wake up window feature is awesome. I have recommended this app to countless peers… Sadly I cannot recommend it anymore. The app also does not have a feedback feature for you to reach out to the developers so… I consider that quite a shortcoming as well.