If you’re finding yourself nodding off in the afternoon, or waking up feeling like you’ve only just gone to bed, then what you need is a report on your sleep quality to find out what’s happening. If you’ve got an Apple Watch Ultra, then you already have the device you need to help you track your sleep glued to your wrist. All you need is the right software to unleash its potential.
You can track your sleep using the Sleep app on the Apple Watch Ultra. The app lets you create Wind Down and Bedtime schedules to help you meet your sleep goals. It also tracks your sleep automatically when you wear your Apple Watch to bed. Once you wake up, you can view how much sleep you got the last night on the Sleep app. In addition, you can view your sleep trends over the past two weeks. The Sleep app on the Apple Watch Ultra also offers a Sleep Focus feature, which limits distractions before you go to bed and ensures you don’t wake up due to untimely notifications.
Apple’s built-in sleep tracking in the Apple Watch Ultra is not bad at all, but it’s not perfect. For example, if you take a little nap during the day, it won’t register. And while the stats it throws out will satisfy the most incurious of you, there is so much more that can be gleaned from our time in the land of nod.
I’ve tried a ton of sleep tracking apps on my Apple Watch Ultra — these are the best of the bunch.
AutoSleep
AutoSleep is probably the best sleep tracking app for Apple Watch Ultra, and for good reason. It’s one of the few sleep trackers that includes a companion app for your Apple Watch, so you can see your sleep quality right on your wrist without having to look at your iPhone.
The amount of stats AutoSleep can produce from your night’s sleep is simply staggering, and tapping on any of them seems to reveal even more layers of information.
It also uses a simple ring-based scoring system that is very like Apple’s own Move, Exercise and Stand rings, combined with a green, amber and red color scheme that everybody will be familiar with. Red is bad, amber better and green is good. We also thought it did a better job of accurately deducing how long we’d been asleep than the other apps, too, but we’ll be honest, we still felt Apple’s own Health app did the most accurate job of estimating how long we’d been asleep.
AutoSleep isn’t free, but it’s only $4.99 on the App Store, which is a one-time purchase that isn’t going to break the bank. And after that purchase you don’t need to worry about a monthly subscription or more in-app purchases, as you do with a lot of other sleep tracking apps.
The amount of stats AutoSleep can produce from your night’s sleep is simply staggering, and tapping on any of them seems to reveal even more layers of information. If you want to find out if you have any medical conditions, like say, sleep apnea, then the data here will give you solid proof of what’s going on, which you could present to a medical doctor for a diagnosis. But there are also simple graphs that show you at a glance how well you’re sleeping — we particularly liked the Sleep Fuel Rating, which is the equivalent of a car’s gas tank meter, but showing if the sleep you’re getting is of sufficient quality to ‘fuel’ your tank.
Best of all is the companion app that is loaded onto your Apple Watch. This means you just have to glance at your wrist to see the important information about how well you just slept when you get up in the morning. Your rings show you your REM sleep and Deep Sleep times and your average heart rate, as well as AutoSleep’s best feature — the Sleep Bank. Here you can see if you are behind on your sleep requirement. Over a week the amount of sleep you’re missing out on can add up to truly staggering amounts, which might make you rethink your sleep patterns and enact a positive change in your lifestyle.
Sleep
Sleep is another great sleep tracking app for Apple Watch Ultra. The app offers support for automatic sleep detection, bedtime reminders, sleep goals, and more. In the Sleep app, the main interface provides a detailed look at your sleep habits over the past few days.
Like its competitors, Sleep also offers quite a bit of data on sleep trends, cycles, phases, and more. You can also see a detailed timeline of your sleep, including when you were restful, restless, and awake, with a particularly neat look at when your “best sleep” occurred.”
One of the best things about Sleep is that it’s completely free, with an optional in-app purchase to remove advertisements. If you’re looking for a data-rich automatic sleep tracker for your Apple Watch Ultra, you can download Sleep on the App Store.
Pillow
With features like automatic sleep detection and heart-rate analysis, Pillow is a great sleep tracking app for Apple Watch Ultra.
One of the key features of Pillow is its support for recording important audio events throughout the night. This means the app can track data including snoring, sleep apnea, and sleep talking, but the biggest caveat here is that noise detection only works in manual mode.
There’s also support for viewing detailed sleep trends over time, personalized recommendations, and more. You can try Pillow on the App Store for free with in-app purchases.
NapBot
NapBot is a newcomer to the Apple Watch sleep tracking fun, and it’s quickly becoming one of the most powerful options. NapBot uses machine learning to perform automatic sleep tracking, allowing you to see details on phases, trends, and more.
NapBot offers an impressive amount of data in an impressively easy-to-navigate interface. The “Calendar” tab in the app allows you to get a detailed look at your sleep on a daily basis, and you can pick a specific day to see more detailed information on heart rate and phases.
NapBot also just launched its first Apple Watch app that’s completely independent of the iPhone. It currently only allows you to see the previous day’s sleep, but hopefully it will add more capabilities and historical data over time.
NapBot is the newest Apple Watch sleep tracking app, but it’s also quickly becoming my go-to. You can download it on the App Store for free with in-app purchases.