Answers first,
then a person.

While you sleep, the app taps the microphone stream and does three things with every fraction of a second of audio: it measures loudness, it writes the audio to a compressed file so you can listen back, and it feeds the stream to Apple's on-device sound classifier, the same model behind iOS sound recognition, which reports how confident it is that each short window contains snoring.

The night is aggregated into short buckets; a bucket counts as snoring when the classifier's confidence crosses your sensitivity setting, and consecutive snoring buckets merge into episodes. Because a trained classifier makes the call rather than a volume threshold, coughs, traffic and a partner talking are not counted as snoring.

The score starts at 100 for a perfectly quiet night and subtracts three penalties: time (how much of the night was spent snoring), intensity (how loud it was, gated so a few loud seconds cannot dominate) and fragmentation (how many distinct episodes there were).

Bands: 90 and above is Quiet, 75 Light, 50 Moderate, 25 Heavy, and below 25 Severe. The full formula, with every constant, is documented in the app's FAQ.

Breathing pauses cannot be found by the sound classifier, because the signal is the absence of sound. Instead the app reduces the night's audio to a loudness contour and scans it with thresholds computed from the night itself, since absolute loudness depends on microphone distance and room tone.

A pause is a quiet stretch between your configured minimum (10 seconds by default) and 90 seconds, and it only counts if the minute before and the minute after each contain audible breathing. Silence in the middle of more silence is just a quiet room. Each detected pause plays back starting a few seconds early so you can hear breathing stop and resume.

Before reporting pauses, the analysis checks the night's contrast between its loud level and its noise floor. If the spread is too small, the microphone never heard breathing clearly above the room, usually because the phone was too far away or a fan or white-noise machine drowned everything. Rather than reporting confident-looking nonsense, the night is flagged so you treat its numbers with caution. Recordings shorter than five minutes are refused outright.

No. A bedside microphone hears sound and nothing else. It cannot measure airflow, breathing effort or blood oxygen, and a partner's breathing or snoring pollutes the signal. A real apnea assessment requires a sleep study with dedicated sensors.

What the app can honestly do is surface stretches where breathing sounds stopped and resumed, count them, and let you listen. If you see many long pauses, hear gasping, or feel unusually sleepy during the day, bring it to a clinician. The Clinician Report puts your nights on five pages, and any night's audio can be exported from its share button.

No. Recording, snore classification, scoring and breathing analysis all run on the device, and the app works with the phone in flight mode, which is the recommended setup. There is no account and no network access. Recordings are also excluded from iCloud and computer backups, which cuts both ways: nothing leaves your phone, but deleting the app permanently deletes every night. Export anything you want to keep via the share button first.

Both directions, and only if you turn it on. Out: every finished night is saved to Apple Health as an in-bed sleep record. In: for each night, the app imports what other sources measured while you slept, such as Apple Watch sleep stages, heart rate, heart-rate variability, respiratory rate and blood oxygen, plus that day's steps, exercise minutes and workouts.

The imported context appears on each night's screen, and the Stats tab combines it with snoring data into observations. Everything is computed on the phone; observations are correlations in your own data, not medical conclusions. The full list of Health categories is in the Privacy Policy.

Settings → Clinician → Clinician Report builds a five-page PDF of your last 30 tracked nights for a doctor or sleep clinic: a summary page, a table of every night, snoring and breathing pauses over time, your Apple Health context and tags, and the STOP-BANG questionnaire with the method, settings and limitations a clinician should know about. The PDF is created on your phone, nothing is uploaded, and the app keeps no copy: preview it, then hand it over with the share sheet.

AHI is the apnea–hypopnea index, scored in a sleep study from airflow, breathing-effort and blood-oxygen sensors. SnoreTracker's "pauses per hour of recording" is a different quantity: quiet gaps in microphone audio divided by hours of recording, including time awake in bed. The report labels it "not an AHI" so it is read as what it is: an acoustic count for a clinician to weigh.

STOP-BANG is a validated eight-item screening questionnaire for obstructive sleep apnea, one point per Yes, with three published risk bands. You answer it yourself in Settings → Clinician. No answer is derived from your recordings or from Apple Health, your answers stay on the phone, and the result is a risk estimate for you and a clinician to discuss, not a diagnosis.

Yes. In the Snore Episodes list, tap the tag next to an episode and choose what it really was: not snoring, a cough, talking, or another sound. Corrected episodes are struck through, leave the snoring time and episode count, and the score is recomputed on the spot. Your corrections survive a re-analysis.

Open the night, tap the ••• menu, then Edit Start & End. Anything outside the range you set is left out of the score, snoring time and episodes, and shown shaded on the timeline. The audio itself is never cut; playback keeps the full recording, and Reset to full recording undoes the trim.

Settings → Data → Export all nights as CSV gives you one row per night with the score, snoring, episodes, mood, tags, breathing pauses and any Apple Health context. It opens in Numbers or Excel. Each night's audio can be exported from its ••• menu, and the share button sends a picture of the night.

Roughly 150–200 MB of audio for a full eight-hour night, plus well under 1 MB for the night's data and cached analysis. The Storage section in Settings shows the running total. Delete old nights from their night screen once you have listened; deleting a night removes its audio, analysis and score. Reinstalling or updating the app over the top keeps everything; deleting the app does not.

No, and neither can we see them. Everything lives inside the app on your phone, and recordings are deliberately excluded from backups because a month of nights is several gigabytes. Deleting the app erases them permanently. To keep a night long-term, export its audio or a CSV first.

Usually not. The night's data is checkpointed every five minutes, and if the app is killed mid-night the session is recovered on the next launch with everything up to the last checkpoint. The audio file itself may occasionally be unplayable if the app could not finish writing it. Keeping the phone on the charger and in flight mode is the most reliable setup.