iOS 18 adds a surprise new health feature — serial nappers rejoice, your sleep tracking is about to get a whole lot better. That's right, your Apple Watch will now be able to detect and record naps in watchOS 11 and iOS 18, so you can get a better idea of your full sleep schedule.
Currently, if you want to track your sleep with an Apple Watch, then the Watch has to be in Sleep Mode. That makes tracking those short bursts of sleep that you have throughout the day almost impossible unless you go and activate Sleep Mode before you briefly doze off.
Now, however, Reddit users have noticed that the Sleep app has tracked their short naps after downloading the iOS 18 Beta, whether they’ve got Sleep Mode activated or not. It’s not been an advertised feature, either — the Redditor in question just took a nap and then noticed it had been tracked in the Health app.
Given that the Apple Watch would only track sleep in very specific circumstances before, this seems like a great way to get a better image of your overall sleep health, and how much rest you’re getting.
watchOS 11 sleep tracking
While I use Sleep Mode in my iPhone and Apple Watch to make sure that there aren’t any notifications coming through while I try to get some shut-eye, I’ve never found the sleep tracking on board all that useful — or, for that matter, all that accurate.
I like to read before I go to sleep on my Kindle, and I do it vertically because it’s more comfortable. My Watch registers this time spent reading (when I am most definitely awake, sometimes to the detriment of my energy levels — but you’ve just got to finish the next chapter) as sleep, giving me an inaccurate picture of the amount of time that I spend sleeping.
While this ‘nap tracking’ that Redditors have spotted sounds like a great thing for loads of users, I’ll be interested to see what activities my Apple Watch now considers sleep when it's not in sleep mode. Who knows, maybe it’ll think I’m napping while I watch TV, or when I’m sitting in a cinema seat. Either way, the sleep tracking hasn’t got better for me since I installed watchOS 11, so I can only assume I am cursed by the sleep tracking gods — or like, Tim Cook or something.
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