Sleepwave: Alarm & Tracker reviews
What users love and hate, from real reviews
A smart-alarm and sleep tracker that uses ultrasonic sonar to wake you gently and chart your sleep phases — beloved for the soft wake-up, yet most of the good stuff sits behind a subscription and the alarm's reliability and accuracy are genuinely in doubt.
What users love
The gentle, gradual wake-up is the single reason people love it
A soft, rising sound wakes you bit by bit instead of jolting you awake — people get up calm and rested and don't want to just kill the alarm and fall back asleep. Many call it the best way to wake up and never go back to the phone's default alarm.
The main feature I love is the gentle wake-up, where a soft sound starts, followed by a gentle alarm. This helps me wake up gradually without rushing to turn off the alarm
the way it wakes me up makes me not want to just turn it off and go back to sleep. Amazing app
No other alarm app wakes me up like this one, and you don't even need to get premium for it to be a good deal
The sleep sounds and tracking genuinely help people sleep better and longer
Rain, campfire, nature and white-noise tracks send people off faster, and the hours-and-phases readout helps them understand their habits. Many report sleeping several hours longer, feeling rested, and finally getting into a routine — even relief from insomnia.
the sleep sounds make you fall asleep so much faster and the way it wakes you up is just amazing
My sleep before:1-4 hours My sleep now:5-9 hours! Thank you soo much sleepwave
This app has really helped me with my insomnia and bad sleep habits.
A beautiful, calming interface — praised even by the unhappy
The design is called pretty, self-explanatory and relaxing: a unique look, a calm way of showing data, a relaxation mandala. Even reviewers who hammer the paywall or accuracy single out the lovely UI — a strength almost everyone concedes.
Nice looking UI though, but wish I could dive deep into the graphs.
Good user interface, seems self explanatory and likely holds good methods of collecting data.
it has less features than many others, but a unique interface.
What users hate
The alarm fails to fire — or goes off at random times in the dead of night
The scariest complaint of all: the product is an alarm, yet it either stays silent (people miss school, work, flights) or fires at 4–5 a.m. or every half hour through the night. Users set a backup phone alarm because they simply can't trust this one.
didnt wake me up on time i missed school
Alarm is going off at completely random times over night
I'm finding myself setting my phone alarm 5 mins after I set this to be sure I wake up
Almost everything is paywalled — even the basic alarm is capped at 3 nights a week
The app used to be free, and the switch landed badly: the core alarm is limited to 3 nights a week, then it's $5/mo or $30/yr. People call it greedy, feel bait-and-switched, and uninstall before they can even tell if it works.
I can't use it more than 3 days a week without paying which is completely ridiculous.
This used to be a great FREE app but now you must pay either $5 a month or $30 for the year. Better apps out there for free
You have to pay to wake up I'd rather go to sleep early
A painful high-pitched sonar whine — unbearable to some, especially younger ears
Tracking runs on ultrasound, but people with sensitive hearing (often teens) hear a sharp whine that hurts their ears and head and can't fall asleep. Some are woken mid-night, some report ear pain — for them the app is simply unusable.
in the middle of the night it makes a very loud high frequency sound and wakes me up and it's so hurtful to my ears and head.
Damaged my ears with the frequency thing I do not recommend this now all I can hear is frequency
how it tracks your sleep releases a ridiculously high painful frequency for me.
Sleep data looks made up — "deep sleep" logged while the user was wide awake
Users catch the tracker in obvious lies: it logs REM or deep sleep while someone lay awake for two hours, got up for a drink, or walked around the room. The graphs feel invented from hours slept rather than actually measured, which kills trust.
Misleading graphs. I lay down and tried to sleep for 2 hours, I was awake for the entire time and the phone graph says I was in REM sleep.
Tells me I was asleep for 6 hours when in reality it was around 3. Even got up out of bed and made noise during that time.
yet when I stopped the app, it said I slept for 1 hour, and even made it to the deep sleep phase. I even walked away at one point - no spikes in the graph
A forced 30% minimum volume — too loud to fall asleep to
To make the sonar work, the app won't let volume drop below 30%, which is too loud for people who fall asleep to quiet music or a podcast in earbuds. Rivals like Sleep Cycle use the mic or motion sensors instead — here the volume floor breaks the whole use case.
forcing volume to 30% or deleting the session makes it unusable for me.
the volume being at 30% is too loud for me to fall asleep properly.
This app demands the volume doesn't go below 30% which is way too loud to be relaxing.
Demands microphone access and won't run without it — "spyware" to many
The alarm refuses to run without microphone access, which some treat as surveillance and uninstall over. Worse, the app keeps complaining the permission is "missing" even when it's been granted — and that phantom error strips people of both tracking and alarm.
Awful app, won't run unless you give it access to your microphone. I don't want an alarm clock that listens to me 24/7 I consider it spyware
I didn't know why it keeps telling me that there is a "permission missing: microphone muted". My mic is not muted and I have granted permission to it.
Why can't I just set the alarm without giving microphone access?
The app crashes overnight, and then the alarm never sounds at all
The session "unexpectedly exits", the screen times out, and the app quietly dies mid-night — losing data and never raising the alarm. For a product you rely on to wake up on time, the overnight crashes make it flatly unreliable.
the app regularly crashes over night (more than 5 times a year) - and when the product is literally a wake up alarm I don't think that's acceptable
Last night the app just shut itself down after an hour so no alarm at all this morning, unreliable.
Sometimes the app "unexpectedly exits" overnight and the alarm doesn't sound.
No recurring or multiple alarms — you have to set it from scratch every night
You can't set a weekday repeat or a separate weekend alarm, there are no multiple alarms, and you must set the time by hand every single night. For a daily alarm that's an astonishing gap — people automate the start themselves or just can't use it consistently.
it doesn't allow to set a recurring alarm, so you must set it every day. Also, doesn't allow to set multiple alarms, such as mon-fri and weekend ones.
There's no scheduled alarm feature, which is astonishing.
you have to manually start sleep tracking every night (I've automated it).
The smart wake-up window misses by half an hour in either direction
People love the idea of waking in a light phase, but in practice the window fires half an hour early, much later, or always at the very last minute — making a wide window pointless. Users lose sleep guessing when it will decide to get them up.
I need an app that goes off at the time I set, not 30 mins before or 15 mins after. I lost way to much sleep because it's trying to predict when I'm going to start moving.
the "wake up window" being a whole half hour sooner or much later than when I said to go off
it will always wake me up within the first 5 min of the alarm, so a 30min frame makes no sense.