Current 2.1: Sleep Gets Serious

Current turns your Apple Health data into a single daily recovery score, 0 to 100, so you know whether today is a day to push or a day to pull back. Version 2.1 is out, and it’s free for everyone who already owns it.

Most sleep tracking grades you on how long you slept. That’s the easy number, and it’s not the interesting one.

2.1 adds two metrics that go further, and skips the one everybody else leads with.

Sleep consistency

Current now tracks when you sleep, not just how long. It measures how much the midpoint of your night moves from one night to the next, and reports it in plain minutes. Plus or minus 24 minutes is very consistent. Plus or minus 90 minutes is irregular.

This isn’t a soft wellness metric. A 2024 study in SLEEP followed nearly 61,000 people and found that sleep regularity predicted all-cause mortality more strongly than sleep duration did. The most regular sleepers had a 20 to 48 percent lower risk than the least regular. Timing turns out to matter at least as much as total hours.

Worth being precise about what Current actually computes: the standard deviation of your sleep midpoint, which is a simpler method than the Sleep Regularity Index the study used. Same underlying idea, different math. And the study is observational, so this is a pattern in the data, not a promise about your lifespan.

It also happens to be something your watch measures reliably. That matters, and it’s the reason this made the cut.

Sleep debt

Your running shortfall against a 7-hour night, across the last two weeks.

Sleep 5 hours on Tuesday and you’re 2 hours down. Sleep 10 on Saturday and you’re still 2 hours down, because a long lie-in doesn’t undo a short week. Current won’t pretend otherwise.

The 7-hour threshold isn’t arbitrary either. It’s the exact point where Current’s scoring starts deducting for short sleep. So the app can never tell you that you’re in debt on a night it just scored 100 out of 100. Other apps measure debt against an 8-hour sleep need, which produces a bigger and more alarming number. I’d rather the two halves of the app agree with each other.

Both numbers live in the sleep detail view, next to the night they’re describing.

What I didn’t add

Sleep stages, deep and REM, are still not scored, and still won’t be.

Consumer wearables disagree wildly with each other about staging. Scoring it would grade you on your hardware rather than your recovery. It’s the same reason I removed stages from the algorithm back in 1.6, and the same principle behind why Current doesn’t try to be a cheaper Whoop. Stages are still shown as context. They just don’t get a vote.

Measure what wearables measure well. Refuse to score what they don’t. Both of the new metrics in 2.1 are here because they clear that bar, not because sleep needed more numbers.

Light mode

Current has been dark only since launch. A user wrote in asking for a light theme, and 2.1 has one: Light, Dark, or System, in Settings. Widgets and shared score cards follow along.

It was more work than inverting the background. The score colors, including that bright mint green at the top of the range, were chosen to glow against black. On white the same green sits at a contrast ratio of about 1.8 to 1, which is effectively invisible in exactly the daylight that makes people want light mode in the first place. So the whole tier palette has a second set of values for light backgrounds, and every color in the app is now checked against the surface it actually sits on by an automated contrast test.

Those tests caught two problems that had already shipped in the dark theme. They’re fixed too.

One more thing, fixed

The daily reminder could show you the previous day’s score. If you opened the app in the afternoon, that afternoon’s number got baked into the next morning’s notification. iOS freezes a notification’s text the moment it’s scheduled, so it arrived the next day stating a stale number as fact.

Reminders are now scheduled one day at a time, keyed to the date they belong to. A day’s notification can only ever carry that day’s score. If a fresh score isn’t available in time, you get the plain “time to check in” wording instead. Never a wrong number.

Still one purchase

Current 2.1 is free for everyone who already owns it. No subscription, no account, no ads, and every one of these numbers is computed on your own device.

If you’ve been meaning to try it, take a closer look at Current. And if you already open it every morning, thank you. The update is waiting in the App Store.