BetterSleep: Sleep tracker

BetterSleep — previously Relax Melodies — is a soundscape app with sleep tracking attached. The core of it is mixing ambient sounds: rain, waves, white noise, instrumental pieces, layered to taste and set on a timer.

What it does well

The mixing is the genuine feature. Rather than picking one track, you build a combination and save it, and the layering is what makes it work better than a single looping recording. The library is large and the loops are long enough not to be obvious.

The sleep tracking is the weaker half

Phone-based sleep tracking infers stages from movement and sound picked up by a device on the mattress or the nightstand. That is a coarse signal. It is reasonable at telling you roughly when you fell asleep and how often you stirred; the sleep-stage breakdown it draws from that should be read as an estimate rather than a measurement.

If sleep staging matters to you, a wearable does it better. If you want something to fall asleep to, the sounds are the point and the tracking is a bonus.

The subscription

Most of the library and the tracking features sit behind a recurring subscription, and the app prompts persistently. The free tier includes enough sounds to know whether the approach suits you before paying.

Practical notes

• Running audio all night with the screen off is fine for battery, but the sleep tracker keeping the microphone active is not — expect a meaningful overnight drain if you enable it.
• Downloaded sounds play offline; streamed ones do not.