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In the morning, you get to hear it
The first honest thing anyone can give you about your snoring is what it actually sounds like. Everything else, including every number in every app, is downstream of that.
In short
Someone has told you that you snore, or you have woken yourself up doing it, and you have no idea how loud it really is or whether it is the kind of thing that matters.
- sound types classified on-device
- 3sound types classified on-deviceSnores, coughs and sleep talking, all on the phone itself
- insight metrics, including tag correlations
- 21insight metrics, including tag correlations
- medical claims
- 0medical claimsTock records and labels sound. It does not diagnose anything
Read this part before anything else
Tock is not a medical device. It records sound and labels some of it as snoring, and that is the whole of what it does. It does not detect sleep apnea, it does not screen for it, and nothing it shows you is a result you can act on medically.
Loud snoring on its own is common. Loud snoring together with daytime sleepiness, gasping or choking at night, or somebody telling you that you stop breathing, is a reason to see a doctor. Book the appointment. Do not spend three months collecting nights first, because none of those nights are evidence of anything a clinician can use.
If any of the above is true for you, the useful next step is a GP, not an app.
You are the only person in the house who has never heard it
Tracking runs the microphone and the accelerometer all night with the phone on the nightstand. Apple SoundAnalysis classifies snores, coughs and sleep talking on the phone itself, and the clips are saved against the night so you can play them back in the morning.
This is the part people find genuinely useful, and it is not the chart. It is hearing 02:40 and realising it is either much worse than you assumed or much less dramatic than you were told.
What genuinely changes how much you snore
Ordinary things, and they move the needle more than any tracking does.
- Sleeping on your side instead of your back. This is the single biggest lever for most people.
- Alcohol in the few hours before bed relaxes the airway and reliably makes it worse.
- A blocked nose from a cold or from allergies. Worth treating for its own sake.
- Weight, honestly. It is not the only factor and it is not a moral one, but it is a real one.
- A doctor can look at all of this properly, including the parts you cannot assess yourself.
Turning a vague accusation into something you can look at
The value of a few weeks of nights is pattern rather than proof. You can tag nights with alcohol, a cold, a late meal or a different pillow, and the tag correlations in the insights show you which tags line up with the loud nights.
That is a reasonable thing to bring to a GP as background, in the same way you would mention that it is worse after a drink. It is context for a conversation, not a test result.
The parts of Tock that apply to you
Not all of it will. These are the ones that do something specific about the problem above.
- Snore recordingYou get the clips rather than a score. Play back 02:40 and hear it for yourself instead of taking somebody's word for how bad it is.
- Sleep trackingThe microphone and the accelerometer run all night from the nightstand, and the classification happens on the phone with Apple SoundAnalysis rather than somewhere else.
- Sleep scoreTag the nights with alcohol, a cold or a late meal and the correlations show which of them line up with the loud ones. Pattern, not diagnosis.
- Sleep coachAsk what it heard last night and it plays the clips back and talks through the pattern across recent nights. It will not tell you what any of it means medically, because it cannot.
Where Tock will not help
- Tock is not a medical device. It does not detect, screen for or diagnose sleep apnea or any other condition, and nothing it shows you should be read as a medical result.
- Loud snoring together with daytime sleepiness, gasping, choking, or somebody telling you that you stop breathing needs a doctor, not an app. Book the appointment now rather than after another month of recordings.
- Sound classification on a phone is not perfect. It will label some things as snoring that were not, and miss some that were, particularly in a noisy room or with two people in the bed.
- Tock cannot tell whose snoring it is. If you share a bed, some of what it records is the other person, and there is no way for it to separate you.
Tock estimates your sleep and is not a medical device. Nothing it shows you is a diagnosis, and anything that worries you is a conversation for a doctor rather than an app.
Questions people ask
Can Tock tell me if I have sleep apnea?
No. Tock is not a medical device and has no ability to detect or screen for apnea. If you snore loudly, wake gasping, or feel sleepy through the day despite enough hours, see a doctor about it rather than an app.
Where do the recordings go?
The classification runs on your phone using Apple SoundAnalysis, and the clips are saved against the night so you can play them back in the morning from the per-night view.
Will it pick up my partner instead of me?
It might. The microphone hears the room rather than a person, so in a shared bed some of what it records will be the other one of you. There is no way for the app to tell you apart.
How do I actually snore less?
Side sleeping instead of back sleeping helps most people. Less alcohol in the hours before bed helps. A blocked nose is worth treating. Beyond that it is a doctor's question, and worth asking if it is loud or somebody has noticed you stopping.
Other situations
The same problem seen from a different bed.
- Light sleepersYou wake at everything, and then you are awake for forty minutes at 3am doing arithmetic on how much is left. By morning you cannot say what woke you, only that something did, several times.
- Heavy sleepersYou have slept through alarms you definitely heard, and turned some of them off without ever waking up. The problem is not your hearing. The part of you that swipes an alarm away is awake several minutes before the part of you that makes decisions.
- New parentsYou do not wake up to an alarm any more, you wake up to a small person, three or four times, and then you have to be a functioning adult by seven. The night is not so much short as it is in pieces.
- Night shift workersYou finish at 7am and try to sleep while the sun is up, the neighbours are drilling and your phone is on silent so nothing wakes you. Then you have to get up on time anyway, in the middle of what your body still thinks is the afternoon.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake tonesAnnoying alarm soundsAn unbearable alarm tone works for roughly a week. After that you learn to silence it before you are properly conscious, and you are back where you started with a worse mood attached. The durable fix is not a harsher sound, it is making the alarm end somewhere your half-asleep self cannot reach.
- Head to headSleep as Android vs Sleep CycleOn Android, if you want every dial and every integration you can get, Sleep as Android is unmatched. If you want something simple, or your partner is on an iPhone, Sleep Cycle is the one that works for both of you.
- FeaturesApple HealthTock reads Apple Health for sleep, heart rate, resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, respiratory rate and wrist temperature, and shows them on the night they belong to. It can also write its own nights back into Health, but that setting defaults to off.
- Sleep soundsStreamA small stream is mostly mid and high frequency water noise with very little below a couple of hundred hertz, so it sounds alive and close but has almost nothing to fight a passing truck with. It suits a quiet bedroom where you want an alternative to silence, not a room you are trying to defend.
- AlternativesTock vs PillowStay with Pillow if you track on your wrist, because it runs on the Watch and Tock does not. Choose Tock if your phone is the only thing on the nightstand and you want the alarm to be the centre of the product rather than a feature of the tracker.
- RoundupsThe best white noise apps, and when a fan beats all of themIf you want one sound forever, a hardware noise machine or a cheap fan beats every app here and costs less over two years. If you want to change what you sleep to, layer sounds together and have the same app wake you up in the morning, Tock is the better pick.
Start with the moment you get woken
It is the one part of your night you can change tonight. Tock waits for a lighter moment in the last half hour and rings a little early when it finds one.