The free iPhone app that records your snoring
Most snoring apps stop at the recording. SleepTrace tells you what the snoring did to your night.
SleepTrace records your snoring on iPhone for free, saves each episode as a short clip with a decibel reading, and shows which sleep stage it hit — awake, light, deep or REM. It needs no wearable and no extra hardware: the phone sits on the nightstand and everything is analysed on the device, so it works offline. Recording and listening back costs nothing; Premium is optional.
How to
Record your snoring tonight
- Put your iPhone on the nightstandScreen down or up, plugged in, within a couple of metres of your head. No special position and nothing under the mattress — the microphone does the work.
- Press start before you go to sleepOne tap. SleepTrace records the night and shows a Live Activity on the Lock Screen so you can see it is running.
- Sleep normallyEverything is analysed on the phone itself, so it works in airplane mode and nothing is uploaded while you sleep.
- Listen back in the morningYou get a timeline of the night with every snoring episode marked, each with a decibel reading and a short clip you can play.
The difference
A recorder tells you that. This tells you what it cost you.
That is the whole argument for using a sleep tracker rather than a snore recorder: snoring on its own is a sound. Snoring placed inside your sleep stages is information.
Straight about it
What this app cannot do
It cannot diagnose sleep apnea. No app can. SleepTrace surfaces snoring patterns and apparent pauses in breathing and hands you the recordings; a diagnosis needs a sleep study arranged by a doctor. It is a wellness app, not a medical device.
It cannot separate two sleepers with certainty. The microphone records the room. Placing the phone on your side helps, but if your partner snores too, the clips are how you find out who is who.
It cannot measure your heart. Heart rate, HRV and blood oxygen need a sensor on your body. Pair an Apple Watch if you want those — it is optional, not required.
Common questions
Snoring apps, answered
Yes. SleepTrace records your snoring every night on the free tier, including the labelled clips, your sleep stages, the sleep score and the smart alarm. Premium is optional and unlocks unlimited clip storage, long-term trends and deeper insights — but recording and hearing your snoring does not cost anything.
It depends on what you want out of it. Dedicated snore recorders give you the audio and a loudness score. SleepTrace gives you the audio and then places it inside your night: which sleep stage you were in when the snoring started, how loud it got, and whether your breathing appeared to pause. If you only want to know whether you snore, any recorder will do. If you want to know what the snoring did to your sleep, you need one that tracks sleep as well.
Detecting snoring from audio is one of the easier tasks in sleep tracking — snoring is loud, rhythmic and distinctive, which is why phone microphones handle it well. Estimating sleep stages from the same audio is harder, and every consumer tracker, phone or wearable, produces an estimate rather than a clinical measurement.
No. The Apple Watch does not record audio at all, so snoring, sleep talking and coughing are invisible to it. Its sleep-apnea notification feature, cleared by the FDA in 2024, works from movement data rather than sound. To hear your snoring you need a microphone, which means a phone app.
It records the room, so a second sleeper is picked up too. Placing the phone on your side of the bed and close to your head biases the recording towards you, but SleepTrace cannot tell two people apart with certainty. The clips let you check for yourself, which is usually the fastest way to settle the question.
No app can diagnose sleep apnea — that needs a sleep study arranged by a doctor. What SleepTrace can do is flag snoring patterns and apparent pauses in breathing and hand you the actual recordings, so you walk into the appointment with evidence instead of a vague worry. It is a wellness app, not a medical device.
SleepTrace is a wellness app and does not diagnose, treat or prevent any medical condition. If you are worried about your breathing during sleep, speak to a qualified healthcare professional.