Night 3: Sleep Watch
So I downloaded a new app last night, this one was $4.49. I actually meant to buy AutoSleep, but all the similar names, the same price and the fact I was lying in bed at the time all led to me purchasing the wrong one.
While the more I consider it, the more it seems obvious, but I’m guessing that all these apps are essentially tracking raw data that the watch already captures. Maybe by default the Apple Watch simply discards this data or maybe doesn’t retain it with enough granularity to provide these sorts of reports, a common comment in feedback seems to be that this sort of functionality should be included by default… although if I was to guess I would say that Apple has intentionally kept this out until they are more convinced in the ability of the battery to support this as a more common use case. Speaking of battery, the Series 0 worked beautifully again only dropping 20 - 25% overnight and the transition to my Series 3 works brilliantly too, essentially I get up, organise myself then take off the Series 0 when I have a shower and put my Series 3 on afterwards. At the moment I am going into the sleep apps to see what they say so I’m not sure when/how they normally transfer their data so I’m not sure if my manual interaction is ensuring the data is captured by the phone or if it’s magically transferring live. Something I will test eventually.
So my impressions at this stage are that the differentiation between these apps is primarily how they display the information and then any insights they might be able to suggest.
So what did I think of Sleep Watch?
Sleep watch is fully automatic, which is very nice. Given it syncs with your health data it’s also happily picked up the data from Pillow so is showing me the last few days too. It has what I would consider being a simplified display showing only a light and dark bar showing when you were restful vs restless. It looks to have correctly detected sleep on its first try, something claims it gets better at over time too.
The same data from Pillow shows a more detailed breakup, although as I said earlier, this is probably just more guesswork on the same raw data. I sort of prefer this, but would probably take the automation of Sleep Watch over this. On the upside, using Pillow means I would get data in both apps… even if I had to manually start it. (again reinforcing the idea that they are all just feeding off the same raw data field)
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It’s also interesting to note that the two different apps show different numbers. Sleep Watch is showing 4:40 for restful sleep vs 5:50 of sleep in Pillow. I do note that they have different finish times in the screen shots, but this is something I have corrected in Sleep Watch and it’s still showing 4:40. I can guess these are slightly different metrics or just a difference in interpretation??
I will have to manually run Pillow tonight to get another data point.
(And yes I was awake between midnight and 1am thanks to children/school holidays).
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