The thing is, it’s hard to tell just how good the sleep is that you’re getting unless you track it. Sleep apnea, for example, is a sleep disorder that causes a shortage of breath, seriously impacting your sleep and health, but you may not even realise it’s happening. That’s why we’ve put together this list of the best sleep-tracking apps for Android. They utilize all the fancy tech in your smartphone to give you an idea of your sleep patterns, letting you make those little adjustments in your life that will help you sleep better.
1. Sleep as Android
Probably the most lauded sleep tracker app around, Sleep as Android, has a number of features that make it stand out from the crowd. The most notable of these is probably the sonar sound emission, which is barely audible but listens for your breathing patterns to track your sleep. You can use the standard accelerometer features on your phone to put the phone in bed with you. Alternatively, you can integrate it with Android Wear, but the sonar is a nice bonus. Beyond that, it has the expected “Wake during light sleep” function, as well as a CAPTCHA alarm, which makes you solve a simple math equation to stop the alarm, forcing you to be alert and stopping you from snoozing. Other features include a dream diary and a log where you enter your caffeine intake, food intake, and other data to see if any of it affects your sleep.
2. Sleep Cycle
Another big hitter, Sleep Cycle is a smart alarm clock that tracks your movements in bed to wake you up during light sleep phases, and then some. Of all the apps in this list, it’s the most data-centric, giving you detailed data analysis of your sleep activity and offering charts that let you link variables like exercise, being on holiday, baths before bed, you name it, to your sleep quality. Another interesting thing it shows is the quality of sleep you get each day of the week, which then lets you hone in on things you may be doing on a given day that could be affecting you. The app can sync up with wearables like FitBit and even Philips Hue lighting, making your bedroom lights replicate sunlight as the sun rises. Very nice!
3. Runtastic Sleep Better
If you like to use apps to track your general health, then you may have heard of Runtastic for its step counters and exercise apps, but it has a sleep app, too, which uses your accelerometer or Android Wear to track your sleep movements, offering a ton of very exact data on how much kip you’re getting each night. Like other apps in this list, you can set a sleep window to wake up in, with the alarm waking you when you’re in a light sleep phase. There’s a dream diary, a habits diary, and a long-term log of your sleep patterns over time. One of the more curious features of this app is a moon phase tracker, which lets you know what phase the moon is in each night, so you can see whether you sleep better during certain moon phases. This way, if you see that you get no sleep during a full moon, you can be almost certain that you’re actually a werewolf and should seek immediate assistance.
4. Sleep Time
Simpler than every other app on this list, Sleep Time is for people who simply want a sleep tracker that wakes them up during their lightest sleep phases. It doesn’t integrate with Android Wear, relying on your in-phone accelerometer instead. You’ll find no superfluous graphs and charts here – just a simple material design interface that lets you set a few variables, such as how long it takes you to fall asleep and what time you should be going to sleep if you aim to wake up at certain times. Because it’s been designed by a solo developer, there isn’t a ton of reviews for Sleep Time, but those who have reviewed it seem to swear by it, as it’s clocked an excellent review score of 4.7.
Conclusion
Sleep is important, and each of us has our own quirks that make us sleep better or worse. For some, these apps may solve everything, for others they won’t, but at the very least they can help you identify certain habits and patterns that you can work on in relation to your sleep.
