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Sleep as Android picks up beta Material You support — and Android 12 isn't even out yet
Urbandroid is usually ahead of the curve
For many, Android 12 is Material You first and foremost, with all the other features and enhancements playing second fiddle to the new (and quite snazzy) dynamic theming and design language. Google's already updating some of its apps to take advantage of the new changes, but one enterprising developer has taken the partially undocumented and non-final APIs into his own hands. Sleep as Android is soon releasing a beta version of the app with support for Android 12's Material You, and you can download it a few days early here.
Android apps that have to run in the background like sleep-trackers have had a rough time. Among other things, they suffer inconsistent and unreliable background app limitations across different Android versions, which can interfere with how the apps work at a very fundamental level. This doesn't fix that issue, but today Google is rolling out a specific API just for those apps, letting them pull sleep duration data right from the system itself.
DontKillMyApp benchmark released from Early Access with new icon
From Urbandroid, the folks behind dontkillmyapp.com and Sleep as Android
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Urbandroid, the developers behind Sleep as Android, have suffered plenty of headaches getting their app to work on a wide range of Android phones. Different manufacturers all think they have great ideas when it comes to stretching out battery life. Usually, they do it by aggressively killing apps in the background, which can break app functionality. Urbandroid even made a site called DontKillMyApp to track and shame the worst offenders and point out how to fix these issues on different phones (if you even can). Now Urbandroid is making a new benchmarking tool to measure your own phone's background apps performance. Like the previous site, it's also called DontKillMyApp, and it's available now in early access on the Play Store.
Google Fit is an excellent service for tracking your health goals and gathering data from various fitness apps on your Android device. After its big redesign last summer and the re-addition of the widget it lost during that transition, the app now receives even more formerly available features: the latest update to version 2.10.36 includes elevation charts for outdoor workouts and support for third-party sleep tracker data again — the latter being first introduced 2015.
Sleep as Android is a hugely popular app in the Play Store with more than 10 million downloads. The app uses sensors in your phone or certain wearables to analyze your sleep, but the team behind Sleep as Android is now looking to make a dedicated piece of tracking hardware, and it's a bit unusual. The Sleep Phaser on Indigogo is a bedside sensor that tracks your sleep without any direct contact.
How do Androids sleep? Why do Androids sleep? I wouldn't know. I do know, however, that if you want to sleep like them, you can get the help of an app that rises (or lays down) to the task. Sleep as Android helps you fall asleep with lullabies, tracks your sleep cycles, and wakes you up at an optimal time with nature sounds. And it just got a little bit better in this latest update.