Try it tonight.
Place your iPhone on the nightstand, tap Start, and fall asleep.
Wake up to a clear picture of your night.
iOS 17.6 and later · One-time purchase · Not a medical device
Snoring has a unique acoustic fingerprint that decades of research has documented in detail. NightSnore uses the same signal-processing techniques studied in peer-reviewed literature — running entirely on your iPhone, with no cloud, no account, and no subscription.
Every second you sleep, a quiet four-stage process runs in the background. Here's what happens.
NightSnore continuously estimates your room's background noise throughout the night using a sliding-window percentile method. No 30-second wait — it adapts silently from the first moment and keeps adjusting as conditions change.
Using iOS background audio, the microphone stays active while your screen is off. Audio is analyzed in real time; nothing is stored unless a snore is detected.
Each sound is analyzed across multiple dimensions: energy, dominant frequency, harmonic structure, and spectral shape. Only sounds with a snore-like fingerprint are recorded.
Events are grouped into episodes, a Snore Index is calculated, and a full timeline is assembled — ready for you to review the moment you wake up.
Snoring is produced in the upper airway — the same part of your body that produces speech. This gives snores a characteristic quasi-harmonic structure: a low fundamental frequency (typically below 500 Hz) accompanied by a stack of overtones, much like a note played on a musical instrument.[1]
Bed shuffling, duvet rustling, and rolling over produce sounds that are completely different: short, percussive bursts with energy spread across all frequencies — more like a cymbal crash than a tone. This physical difference is the key that lets NightSnore separate true snoring from night-time movement noise.
Research confirms that snore events typically last between 0.3 and 3 seconds each.[2] Events shorter or longer than that range are automatically excluded, eliminating the false alarms that simpler apps produce from brief thumps or long ambient sounds.
Simple sound-level apps flag everything loud as a snore. That's why they pick up your partner shifting in bed, a truck driving past, or a door closing down the hall.
NightSnore runs a two-stage detection approach — the same architecture recommended in academic sound-event detection research.[3] The first stage is intentionally broad, catching every possible snore candidate. The second stage is strict: it checks the harmonic fingerprint and spectral shape of the sound to confirm it genuinely matches a snore — not a creak, a cough, or a rustle.
The result is a system that misses very few real snores while producing far fewer false alarms per night compared to energy-only approaches. Only after passing both stages is a short clip saved to your device.
NightSnore doesn't just count snore events — it calculates a Snore Index: the number of snore events per hour of sleep. This is the same basic metric used in clinical sleep monitoring, making your nightly score comparable across different session lengths.
Slept 4 hours instead of 8? The Snore Index still tells you the same thing about your snoring intensity. It's a rate, not a raw count — which makes trends over time meaningful even when nights vary.
Sessions shorter than 30 minutes are excluded from index calculation, since shorter recordings don't capture a full light-sleep cycle and can produce misleading results.
| Index | Level | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| < 10 | Mild | Occasional snoring; low impact on sleep quality |
| 10 – 30 | Moderate | Frequent snoring; worth monitoring trends |
| > 30 | Severe | Very frequent snoring; consider consulting a doctor |
For reference only. NightSnore is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose sleep disorders.
Independent studies have validated microphone-based snore detection on smartphones across hundreds of participants and thousands of hours of sleep recordings.
A CNN+RNN deep learning model for smartphone snore detection achieved ~95% accuracy, with ~92% sensitivity and ~98% specificity — and directly studied the effect of microphone placement distance.
Xie et al., Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 2020. doi:10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105917
A 2025 smartphone study using a Vision Transformer, validated on both hospital and home recordings across hundreds of participants, reported sensitivity and specificity around 90% on a held-out test set.
Hong et al., Nature and Science of Sleep, 2025. doi:10.2147/NSS.S514631
A 2025 independent benchmark of a commercial snore-detection algorithm found ~86% sensitivity and ~99% specificity on a diverse test set including simulated non-snoring files — meaning very few false alarms.
Brown et al., JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 2025. doi:10.2196/67861
These figures are from independent academic studies, not NightSnore's own testing. Real-world accuracy depends on phone placement, room acoustics, and individual snoring patterns. NightSnore is built on the same proven DSP and signal-processing foundations documented in this research.
Place your iPhone on the nightstand, tap Start, and fall asleep.
Wake up to a clear picture of your night.
iOS 17.6 and later · One-time purchase · Not a medical device