napnap vs Napper: what napnap does better

The time comes from your baby, not from their age

Napper works the wake window out from the age bracket. It is a reasonable starting point, but the range of normal at any age is enormous: two five-month-olds can last an hour and a half and two and a half hours, and both are fine.

napnap starts the same way and within a few days stops: every awake stretch that ends in a real sleep counts as evidence, recent counts for more, and three weeks ago is forgotten. From then on the time is your child's.

And it tells you how much of that time it is making up

It is the difference you notice most in the first month. napnap shows a percentage —«40 % of this is theirs by now»— and it climbs as it learns.

A forecast that will not admit what it still does not know is a forecast you cannot decide whether to trust today.

Fourteen days ahead, every hour with its margin

napnap projects up to two weeks: what time they would get up, the naps with their hour and their length, the awake stretches in between —which is where a meal fits— and bedtime.

Every hour carries its margin, added in quadrature, because the morning moves and every window adds its own: the third nap is known less well than the first and that has to be said with a number. The night does not carry that margin because it is anchored to the household's clock.

A nap and a night are not the same thing

napnap learns separately how long a nap lasts and how long a night lasts, and the night by median rather than mean.

With a single average —the naps'— an app tells you at four in the morning that they are long overdue. And in a house where the small-hours waking sometimes gets recorded as two sleeps, half a dozen split nights drag a mean and do not move a median.

Sleep, feeds and food are recorded in the same place

Feeds with a stopwatch per side and the answer to the four-in-the-morning question: which side do I start on.

And solids with a year-long plan and 92 foods, with iron from the second week and the waits by age checked on the server.

Two phones, one home, and each with their own alerts

Both apps can be shared with a partner, so that is not the difference: the difference is what sharing brings. In napnap each person signs in with their own email on their own phone, not with a borrowed profile, and nobody has to pass a password to anybody — among other things because there is no password to pass.

And the alerts belong to each of you. You may want the night to wake you and the naps not to while your partner wants the opposite: the baby is the same and the records are the same, but the phone that rings is whichever each of you said.

The address stays on the home's list, it is not a single-use invitation: somebody who loses it and asks for a link six months later still gets in, and taking it off the list takes their access away that same moment. Six fit, so the grandmother who stays at weekends is one more address and not a borrowed phone.

And it is yours: open API, Siri shortcuts and free

Everything the app does goes through a documented API with one key per home. Recording a nap with Siri, or having it read the time out loud, is two steps in Shortcuts.

napnap is free and has no paid tier. There are no ads and no data is sold: what is kept here is a baby's hours of sleep.

Questions

Is napnap really free?

Yes. There is no paid plan, there are no ads and no data is sold.

Can we both use it without sharing a phone?

Yes. You add their address in Settings, they sign in with theirs on their phone and you see the same thing. Each of you chooses which alerts to get, and a home takes up to six addresses.

Do I need to install anything?

No. It opens in the browser and you add it to your home screen like an app: from there it runs full screen and receives the alerts.

Can I take what I have recorded with me?

Yes, the API returns all of it as JSON and what you record is yours.