Why your white noise app stops at night, and how to fix it

By Springlab · 21 October 2026. We make White Noise. Before we built it we read 12,322 one-to-three-star reviews of the 10 biggest sleep-sound and white-noise apps on Google Play, to find out what goes wrong at night. This page is the result, with the fixes for your phone and what we did in the app. We name no other app here; the problem is in every one of them.

How common it is

US Google Play, October 2026, newest reviews first, up to 600 per star for each app. Counts are keyword matches; we read samples of each theme to check them. The first row is the one this page is about.

The four causes

1. The app's own timer. Some apps ship with a sleep timer already on, and some start it again when you pause and resume. The sound stops at the same minute every night. This is the first thing to check, because no phone setting fixes it.
2. Battery saving. When the screen has been off for a while, Android puts the phone into a deep sleep (Doze) and stops apps that are not built to run in the background. Some phone makers add their own, stricter savers on top, which put apps "to sleep" after a few days without use. The sound stops minutes or hours in, at no fixed time.
3. Bluetooth. Earbuds and speakers have their own power saving and their own timeouts, and some phones save battery on the Bluetooth link itself. The app is still playing; the sound just does not reach you.
4. How the app plays. An app that plays sound as part of its screen, or that queues each sound with an ordinary timer, is at the mercy of the first two causes. Android lets an app play with the screen off only when it runs a media service with a notification you can see. Without that, the sound stops when the screen does.

Fix it on your phone

1. Open the app's timer and set it to off (or to the time you want). Play for a night with the timer off to rule it out.
2. Android: Settings → Apps → the app → Battery → Unrestricted. On many phones this is the whole fix.
3. Samsung: Settings → Battery → Background usage limits → Never sleeping apps → add the app. On the same screen, turn off Put unused apps to sleep, or the phone puts it back after a few days. If the app is already in the Deep sleeping list, remove it there first.
4. Labels differ between Android versions and phone makers. If you cannot find these, search Settings for "sleeping" or "battery", and look for a setting with the words unrestricted, no restrictions, or allow background.
5. Plug the phone in for the night. A phone on a charger does not go into deep sleep, so this works even when the settings do not.
6. Use the speaker or wired headphones for one night. If the sound now plays through, the problem was Bluetooth, not the app or the phone.

If it still stops after all of this, the app is not built to play in the background (cause 4), and no setting can fix that.

What an app must do

• Run as a media service with a notification with Pause and Stop in it. That is how Android knows the sound is wanted while the screen is off; it is the same rule that lets a music player keep playing.
• Keep its timer on a clock that runs in deep sleep, and check it from the audio thread, so the sound fades out and ends at the chosen time instead of stopping with a click.
• Start its audio again by itself if the phone's audio system restarts in the night, which it can.
• Pause when headphones disconnect, rather than jumping to the speaker at full volume at 3 a.m.
• Make the sound instead of looping a file, or loop it without a seam. This does not stop the sound, but it is the second thing people hear.

White Noise does all five: a media service with Pause and Stop, a timer checked on the audio thread every 50 ms with a fade that ends at the stop time, a new audio track if the system restarts, pause on unplug, and seven sounds made in real time with no loop. What we have tested: in our first overnight test it played all night and stopped at the chosen time, and the same audio engine kept a metronome clicking for 30 minutes in forced deep sleep with no missed click. An 8-hour deep-sleep test with a recording is on our list; the numbers go here when we have them. The same deep-sleep story, for workout timers, is in Does your timer beep on time?