The Best Sleep Apps On Android and iOS

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Sleep has joined the ranks of the infinite list of activities we have the desire to decode, demystify and optimize by means of…you guessed it: a tracking app. But with both Android and iOS marketplaces overflowing with apps promising to revolutionize the way we sleep, where do you start? Then, even if you identify the tools to help you better understand your sleep behaviors, how do you sleep better?

Well, we lost our night’s sleep researching this so you don’t have to.

Here are some of the best sleep tracking apps on the Android and iOS platforms to help you wake up more healthy, happy and well-rested.

The Best Sleep Apps

Note: we didn’t include trackers that operated outside of the Android or iOS platforms, nor trackers with expensive hardware. We don’t expect everyone to be able to drop half a grand on single-purpose sleep detection hardware. After all, financial strain is not good for your sleep quality.

Apple iOS Bedtime Feature

Bare-bones, but it gets the job done

• Price: Free
• In-App Purchases: No
• Wearable Required: No

Let’s start off with something that many of us already have on our phones, whether or not we know it. One of the most basic tools available in the sleep tracking ecosystem, iOS 11’s Bedtime feature is a minimal but workable first step into sleep tracking. It works by using your mic, accelerometer, and touch sensors to keep track of your nighttime activities.

The dashboard reports hours slept, number and duration of sleep interruptions, and wake/sleep times. (Note: you’ll find it by clicking on your clock icon.)

This simple iOS-native sleep tracker performs adequately. At a whopping cost of zero dollars and free of any expensive add-ons or in-app purchases, Bedtime is a good starter app that lacks many of the features touted by more specialized and involved apps further down the list.

Autosleep

Track your sleep deeply

• Price: $2.99
• In-App Purchases: No
• Wearable Required: No (but recommended)

Waking up early is hard. Waking up early and trying to comb through ugly graphs and indecipherable data sheets to get a grip on your night’s sleep is harder. Thankfully, the thoughtfully designed and feature-packed Autosleep exists.

While a bit skimpy without the use of an Apple Watch, the app tracks several different metrics like your nocturnal dip in heart rate, hours slept and “deep” sleep time. Combine these numbers with some math and magic and Autosleep spits out your percent restful sleep, its own proprietary metric for sleep health. The app even has different analytic frameworks you can use if, for example, you have a pacemaker and your nocturnal dip in heart rate is abnormal.

The best part?

If you’re using an Apple Watch, it’s basically “set it-and forget it.” Just wear the watch to bed and let the magic happen.

Sleepbot

He hears you when he’s sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…

• Price: Free
• In-App Purchases: No
• Wearable Required: No

This particular sleep tracker has the interesting ability to record movement and sounds you make during the night with the option to listen to what your sleep-self had to say in the morning.

This means all those amazing conversations you have during your dreams are available in the morning with the press of a button — but we’re guessing you might be hearing a lot of snoring.

Sleepbot uses movement and sound data to determine when you are and aren’t asleep and provides a number of graphs for you to review, take notes on, and rate.

Using these metrics, the app wakes you up during your period of lightest sleep nearest your wakeup time. While a gentler way to wake up than an old-fashioned alarm clock, the smart alarm won’t wake you up exactly at your prescribed time – meaning that the more punctually-minded might have trouble with this.

Sleep Time

Charts and trends and graphs, oh my

• Price: $1.99
• In-App Purchases: Yes
• Wearable Required: No

Between its browser-based dashboard and iOS/Android app, Sleep Time is amongst the most attractive for analytics and stats nerds like us.

Providing a familiar suite of features for trackers on this list like a smart alarm, sleep tracking and soothing sounds to lull you to sleep, the standout feature here is being able to track your nights in detail both on your computer and your phone.

Using the phone’s sensors to track your movement and sounds in bed, the tracker provides you with a “sleep efficiency” metric with which to evaluate your night in bed.

While not earth-shattering in its depth of features or technology, the app more than makes up for it with a wealth of data on your sleep – both nightly and historical – and continued updates and improvements from the developers.

Sleep as Android

For geeks, by geeks

• Price: Free
• In-App Purchases: Yes
• Wearable Required: No (but recommended)

This is one of the tougher ones on the list to recommend. Like many other useful tools in life, there’s a learning curve to making sense of Sleep as Android. Think of something like a chainsaw or a deep fryer – use it right and it’s an incredible tool, use it wrong and you’re short a leg or house. 

This isn’t to say that Sleep as Android is a bad product – quite the opposite. It’s that the tool has an incredible wealth of features, metrics and plug-ins, making it a more involved process to take advantage everything the app has to offer.

Instead of using just motion detection to function, the app uses heart rate, breathing patterns (measured through SONAR), and noise detection to provide a host of different graphs and numbers for users to measure their sleep with. Rather than providing one simple but nebulous proprietary metric from some black-box algorithm, the app provides a wealth of information on which you can analyze your sleep on your own.

Not for the “easy-button” type people, this data-heavy app provides a great solution for those who have an eye for analytics and the patience to sort through heaps of data and complicated graphs to get the absolute most out of their sleep experience.

The app has more going on than we have space for, but for more on Sleep as Android check their documentation here.

Sleep Better

Connecting the dots between your night and your day

• Price: Free
• In-App Purchases: Yes
• Wearable Required: No

Sleep Better has most of the things other apps on the list do – sleep tracking in terms of duration and time spent in deep sleep, historical data on which to draw comparisons, and a smart alarm to help you wake up gently.

What’s interesting here is that it tracks activities during the day—nicotine intake, alcohol consumption, or exercise—and connects them to your sleep analysis.

The app allows you to tag these aforementioned activities and see how they affect your sleep — removing the need to check other tracking apps like myfitnesspal or mapmyrun — with zero switching between screens or button pressing required.

For those looking for a simple app that helps determine causal relations between your night and day, this is it.

Where does this get us?

Our goal is to create an online platform where interested buyers can come and learn everything about the increasingly online mattress industry. We’re here to give you the information you need to buy the best possible mattress for your life. However, we’re not perfect – and – most importantly, we’re not you.

Ultimately you’ll have to decide which mattress is right for you, and this list is to give you a framework for your decision making. Binary indicators of sleep quality like “good” or “bad” are not sufficient and in this day and age, unnecessarily base.

With tools like the ones we listed above, you’ll be able to perform a “before and after” on your new mattress and old taking into account not just things like sleep duration, but quality, number of cycles and duration.

While we’re doing our best to give you your best night’s sleep, this part is up to you. Hit up the iTunes or Google play store, download a few of these, and see what your results are.

Stay tuned for more on everything sleep.