I’ve been using this app for about five months now, and I’ve really noticed a difference in how I wake up. Before this app it was terribly difficult for me to wake up in the mornings, I found myself hitting snooze over and over again and just feeling frustrated and fatigued. Since using this app, 9 mornings out of 10 I find myself awaking refreshed, energized, and ready to get up. It’s amazing. I don’t really use the meditate feature, but the paid version is worth it for the gentle awakening feature, which plays a very soft sound (like birds or ocean waves) for a few minutes before playing the actual alarm. It’s a great way to help me transition to wakefulness and not feel like I need to snooze once the alarm does go off. Also, the sound design of the alarms themselves is very thoughtful; my favorites are long, slowly energizing musical pieces. I can’t go back to the repetitive drone of other alarms.

Edit/Update: Ok, I like the different alarm options and I like you can connect to iTunes for your own sounds. Also, the night sounds includes a variety of nature sounds and music which is a nice feature. It’s not accurate though. It will say I’ve gotten 8-9 hours of sleep when it’s 6-7 hours of sleep. This is worked well the two weeks that I’ve used this. I really love the soft gentle sounds to wake up to versus a regular loud alarm. I also am starting to see trends in my sleep cycle. However, the other night I went to bed at 9 PM and then got up to get a glass of water at 11 PM. And then I was awake later at about 1 or 2 in the morning. This will happen once in a while in which I will have disruptive sleep. When I woke up just before 6 AM I looked at my alarm and it had read “interrupted” and had stopped working. Luckily, I had woken up in time enough to get to work for my regular time waking up. But in the future I will set a back up alarm on just in case. I will continue to use this app and update as needed. Update: 29 nights in, I appreciate this app. I like the different options for gentle wake-up sounds, and the sleep sound options like rain sounds which have a choice for time setting. For example, I set it for 15 or 30 minutes. I’m not sure how accurate the sleep cycle is, and I think it’s tracking and sensing my hubby’s movements as well. I think I get more like 7 hours a night not like 8-9 it says. Still overall a decent app, I like it.

This app’s gentle awakening is genuinely amazing and really does work like they advertise.The feature they absolutely NEED in order to get me to use it more is an option (even if it’s just for premium) to have the sleep mode begin automatically according to a schedule in case you forget to hit “sleep”. This has been the number one problem that keeps me from using the app. I can rely on the default iPhone alarm to go off without thinking about it, but I cannot count on Sleepwave as I have to set it night after night rather than in a preset schedule. I’ve simply stopped using it because of this. I know that some people are find with setting the alarm every night, but I honestly can’t just rely on that. I am also aware that it is trying to track my sleep quality, but honestly, the alarm is more why I’m here. I need a reliable alarm I can set a weekly schedule for and not think about again.You guys really provide users the best wake up experience of any app, but the app takes too much overhead to use like making sure you hit “sleep” and the fact that even when you do, the alarm is liable to not go off. If the phone isn’t charging for whatever reason, don’t just give up on waking us up, sacrifice the constant sleep tracking for the wake up window we provide.Those are my suggestions, I’d pay for this if I had them but the excecution of the feature is just too clunky for me. If I need to use iPhone alarms as a backup because this is so unreliable, then I’d rather just use that.

Everything I said a couple years ago (below) is still true. The only glitch is that the sound portion of the night sometimes doesn’t work. It’s not that there’s no sound- w my snoring and the dog always moving, there are always sounds for sure. The app does have microphone access. I like that feature for various reasons.I had been using another Zen-type alarm for years which was wonderful- except after I quit my awful, anxiety-inducing corporate job, every time it went off all I could feel was flight-or-fight. The alarm had conditioned me to be panic mode. Now that I’m working for myself, at home, I needed a fresh start. This goes above what my previous alarm did! A pre-wake up sound (great idea!) and then I paid for the extra features of selecting just the perfect “alarm” sound. I’m so so happy bc I wake up very slowly and need time to orient myself to another day of living. And I cannot deal w. jolting or loud alarms. This is my perfect Zen wake-up call. Thank you, creators of this!