I’m trying to ascertain the following:
- How many sleep cycles did I get?
- How long were the sleep cycles?
Most sleep apps have this feature, and it is highly sought after by people who purchase sleep apps.
support conversation with Scott
This would be fabulous! It would be great to know how long one’s sleep cycles are, and if we wake up during a sleep cycle (or where in the sleep cycle we wake up). I hope this feature gets added. Here’s a screenshot from another program, but it’s not nearly as powerful as Urbandroid’s Sleep as Android, nor does it sync with Wear OS watches (or any watches for that matter).
If this feature is added, and I follow this thread, will I get notified if / when this feature is added?
I was wondering with all the data my app has taken, whether I would be able to figure out my sleep cycle lengths and therefore be able to calculate ideal times to wake up?
support conversation with Brandon
Hello,
at the moment we do not plan to introduce sleep phase count or any similar indicator to Sleep as Android. We have experimented with such indicator in the past and it is really a wrong direction to go.
Every sleep tracking app works with some thresholds to determine sleep phases, you rarely really have an ideal actigraph like the one shown at the top of this thread. If in one night your sleep phase moves just around the threshold for instance it will fragment the sleep phase into many smaller phases and your sleep phase count goes completely haywire.
So if you simply count light vs. deep phases in long term you are getting something quite close to a random number.
In contrast to this approach there is a perfect indicator of you sleep phases which is the deep sleep % which we are using and which is not affected by this problem. Even when you sleep phase gets fragmented into multiple phases the % will be affected only minimally. If you prefer to have something dependent on the sleep length (as deep sleep % tends to naturally decrease with sleep length) you can instead look at the deep sleep duration as a quality measure of your sleep.
You can say that there may be a better way than just “dummy” sleep phases counting. Yes we could use some “AI” magic e.g. to say that those 3 phases are in fact is one fragmented phase… but is it really? 
or it just looks like it? Who knows.
So instead of relying on phases count which is by definition non-reliable, we use a reliable measure which represents your sleep phases and this is deep sleep % or deep sleep duration.
Did that explain the issue?