Apple Watch sleep-tracking app AutoSleep adds charging reminders, Smart Alarm feature

AutoSleep is one of the most popular and powerful sleep tracking applications for iPhone and Apple Watch. A new update to AutoSleep today adds a pair of new features designed to improve the Apple Watch sleep tracking experience: charge reminders and Smart Alarms.

One of the concerns people have when it comes to sleep tracking with Apple Watch is battery life. In general, we’re trained to charge our devices overnight, but you can’t charge your Apple Watch overnight if you’re also using it for sleep tracking.

Today’s update to AutoSleep brings a new feature that will send you a notification when it’s time to put your Apple Watch on the charger before bed. On average, the Apple Watch takes around an hour to charge, and you can set your charge reminder to arrive at a specific time that fits your schedule.

Once you place your Apple Watch on the charger, you’ll receive a push notification on your iPhone telling you to put the Apple Watch back on:

AutoSleep 6.4 now includes charge reminders. You simply set the time that you’d like the reminder. The default is 8 p.m. but you can change this. If you select ‘Doing it now’ this indicates that you are putting the Watch on the charger now and you would like a reminder on your iPhone in one hour’s time to put the Watch back on again. This reminder also has snooze options.

Apple will reportedly bring first-party sleep tracking capabilities to the Apple Watch soon, and a reminder for charging is actually one of the capabilities that 9to5Mac has reported will be included in Apple’s solution.

AutoSleep has also added a new Smart Alarm functionality. This will allow you to set an alarm directly in the AutoSleep app for Apple Watch. You can choose a window during which you’d like to be woken up. For example, you can say that you’d like to wake up sometime between 5:45 a.m. and 6 a.m.

There are a few options here, including arousal and early wake:

Arousal

One strategy is to have your Apple Watch ‘tickle’ or ‘nudge’ your wrist every minute during your time window. Tickle is light, Nudge is a bit more intense. What this will do is take you out of deeper sleep. You may not even feel it at the time. Or just think ‘what was that?’ and then go back to sleep. This however, will take you out of that deep sleep phase.

We find arousal to be the best option: A 10-minute window with tickle is a terrific way to wake up. It’s like having snooze but without the negatives of snooze. It makes early wake much less appealing, but if you really want this feature, then we’ve included that too.

Early Wake

The other strategy is to let AutoSleep examine how deep your last 5 minutes of sleep was at 1 minute intervals. There are two options here:

• Light Sleep: If you enable this option, if AutoSleep detects you are in a lighter sleep phase according to your AutoSleep calibration settings, then it will wake you up early.
• Medium Sleep: If you enable this option, if AutoSleep detects you are not in a deep sleep phase then it will wake you up early.

AutoSleep is available on the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch as a onetime purchase of $2.99.