Headspace: Sleep & Meditation reviews
What users love and hate, from real reviews
A beloved meditation-and-sleep app with genuinely strong content that, after Andy Puddicombe's departure, feature bloat, and a wave of crashes, turned from a simple tool into an unstable, cluttered, near-fully-paywalled product.
What users love
When it works, the content is genuinely life-changing and best-in-class for sleep
Despite the bugs, people adore the core of Headspace: Andy's guides finally 'make meditation click,' sleepcasts put you under in five minutes, and years of practice genuinely lower anxiety. Many write 'changed my life' and keep the subscription for exactly this.
headspace has changed my life... you can't change what life throws at you but when you have a little headspace you respond to life better
these are incredible for me and work so well - I'm always asleep within ~5 minutes.
Just completed my 1000th meditation on Headspace. I love it. It's changed my life in so many ways.
Sleepcasts are the main reason to pay, but they lack filters and length control
Sleepcasts and soundscapes are the flagship — the reason many keep the subscription for years and fall asleep to them nightly. Requests for filters (rain, ocean), track queuing, and a gentle alarm are 'wishes for a favorite,' not grievances.
I listen to a Headspace sleepcast or white noise while falling asleep every. night.
the sleepcasts, which are amazing and worth the subscription price on their own.
I do really like the sleepcasts, but they are poorly organized. Please provide a filter/sort option
What users hate
After updating, the app freezes on the orange smiley and won't open
The single most common pain: after the May update the app gets stuck forever on the splash screen with the orange face. Reinstalling, clearing cache, rebooting the phone — nothing works. Paying subscribers are left with no access for weeks.
Simply doesn't boot, hangs on the splash screen indefinitely. First time user
Nothing. Just a big Orange, smiley face.
it doesn't open, just stays frozen on the screen with the orange icon in the middle, that doesn't help my mental space...
Forced update loops endlessly: 'update' → store → 'open' → 'update' again
The app demands an update, sends you to the store where the latest version is already installed showing 'Open' — you open it and it demands an update again. An inescapable loop that survives cache-clearing and reinstalls.
It just loops. Prompts me to download update. I've downloaded it. It says open. I open it. Prompts me to download update.
now it is stuck in a loop. i open the new app it tells me yo download the latest version, takes me the store, i alreadu downloaded and installed and it just says open.
Having completed the upgrade, the app will now not open, and says I still need to upgrade, despite already doing so.
Mid-session crashes: meditations and sleepcasts cut out exactly when you need them
Sessions die halfway through — sometimes silent, sometimes with an error, sometimes the sleepcast cuts out overnight. For a relaxation app this is fatal: you have to open your eyes to check if it crashed, which destroys the whole point.
The app often stops in the middle of a meditation session, so I have to keep checking whether the session is still running or if the app has crashed again. This defeats the whole purpose of meditation
when the meditation begins, it immediately crashes
Everything's great until the app crashes when you need it the most
Everything behind the paywall: even the basic breathing exercises that used to be free
Headspace used to offer a free intro course and breathing basics — now literally everything is locked except a one-minute intro. You can't even try a technique without starting a trial. The free tier has become a gallery of padlocks.
locked locked locked locked locked locked locked locked locked... that's literally your interface.
this app used to even provide the basic intro for free but now...beside the 1 minute intro video Nothing is free.
after looking for 5 minutes I finally found something I didn't have to pay for: a 4 minute video for brushing your teeth.
A 'free trial' that charges you immediately, with no refund
Users report that signing up for a '7-day free trial' charges them right away, and cancelling doesn't stop the charge. Support refuses refunds and points fingers at Google. For people with anxiety and money worries, it stings especially hard.
When registering, it charges you right away. Even if you cancel right away you will get charged.
It turns out that Google charged me $76 and I was unable to get my money back. I never even used the app.
dont advertise your free and then try and charge after 7 days. how does that help a person with anxiety and money issues.
A cluttered Netflix-style interface where you can't even find today's meditation
The home screen used to show the day's meditation right away — now it's a tile-heavy feed you doomscroll like social media. Search returns junk, favorites hide in a tiny widget. The paradox: an app about mental clarity overwhelms you itself.
git rid of the netflix-like menu of tiles and make it easy for users to find what they need.
it is quite a paradox to get overwhelmed by a mindfulness app, isn't it?
The mental experience began to resemble that of social media or other attention-exploiting apps.
The app keeps logging you out, especially at the worst possible moment
Headspace regularly logs you out and demands a password — sometimes at 3am during insomnia, sometimes throwing an error when you try to sign back in. No biometrics. A paying subscriber ends up locked out of their own app.
the app suddenly decides to log me out and there's me at 3am trying to find the password to be able to use the app that has been paid for
the app keeps on logging me out and when I try to sign in, it says there is an error. so frustrating.
every time opening the app asking password and login
Downloaded content won't play offline — the point of downloading is lost
You can download meditations, but they won't launch without internet, and updates sometimes wipe all your downloads. On a plane or off-network the app is useless — for travelers, a direct reason to leave.
Headspace allows you to download meditations, but will not play them if you're offline. (what's the point of download?)
app won't let me listen to downloaded offline content when I'm offline like before. Reinstalled, cleared cache etc. - nothing works.
No offline access whatsoever, the app does not load with data turned off.
Andy Puddicombe's departure and the shift to an 'American' tone feels like losing the soul
Long-time subscribers tie the decline to Andy leaving in 2022: the new voices feel less soothing, sometimes 'shouty' and inauthentic, and some content is now voiced by lifeless AI. The app, they say, 'lost its way.'
after andy puddicombe left/stopped making content in 2022 the feel of the app slowly changed until it's completely different now.
Since Andy Puddicombe left it has become too "american" for me. The quality of the content has dropped and it does not speak to me any more.
I also didn't like a lot of the new voices - some are not very calm or soothing, they're shouty
The Ebb AI chatbot and pushy upsells where people are seeking calm
Nobody asked for an AI therapist: Ebb asks repetitive questions, is capped at 30 minutes, and often crashes, while support has been reduced to a useless bot. On top of that, constant prompts to buy more — even for active subscribers — directly contradict the relaxation premise.
I already have a subscription, but every single time I open the app, I get prompted to buy another godforsaken product. It's counterproductive to the relaxation I'm trying to achieve
It mostly asked repeated follow-up questions, and when I asked it to stop, it switched to generic acknowledgments like "I can see how that is difficult," without adding useful insight.
You are losing your way. Nobody asked for AI. Improve the Android app instead
The content is great, but the app is slow and takes forever to load every track
Even short of a full crash, the app is sluggish: startup takes minutes, any track loads painfully slowly, and it sometimes claims 'you're offline' on fast internet. Heavy, storage-hungry, and it takes forever to render the UI.
Waited almost 15 minutes for it to even launch. Yeah, no, that doesn't promote relaxation.
App is really slow. Many time it says I'm offline even when I'm not and connected to fast internet.
it's unoptimized and takes up a ton of storage and is full of bugs
Support via an AI bot that loops you around and never gets you a human
When the app breaks access or billing, help has been reduced to an AI chat that ignores pleas for a human and sends you in circles. Especially painful for those who get Headspace via an employer or insurance and pay a lot.
customer service is reduced to ineffective AI chat bots which send you in loops and ignore pleads to speak to a human.
they pretend to have a chat support but only a AI with no I. only email support and I can't get any help.
the AI chatbot keeps regurgitating useless information about how to theoretically get a refund via Google
Data harvesting under 'wellness': dark privacy settings and selling into ML/ads
Users are alarmed by the new privacy policy: the content of their messages is collected 'to power machine learning and personalize ads,' and the opt-out is hidden and won't stick on the first try. For a mental-health app, it reads as betrayal.
After I finally found the hidden opt-out for one of the many ways they actually betray you behind your back, it took 3 extra attempts to actually make this setting stick.
you collect "any personal information [I] include in the body content of [my] communications." to "power machine learning algorithms" (AI) and "personalise adverts". This is such a philosophical contradiction to what this app seems to be about.
the amount of private data it shares with 3rd parties, despite you paying for the service: not worth it.