Apple Watch sleep score looks set to replicate these two smart ring features

Earlier today we saw iOS 26 code suggesting that an Apple Watch sleep score feature is in development, with a percentage score indicating your readiness to tackle the day ahead. The feature also provides a more condensed graphical representation of your sleep stages than is currently available.

What is shown and described looks like a very close match for two features provided by the Oura smart ring, so here’s a look at how those work …

The Oura Ring readiness and sleep scores

Each morning, when you open the companion app for the smart ring, it loads in sleep data captured during the night. It provides two percentage scores, the first is what Oura describes as Readiness:

Apple’s “focus score” label seems to be describing the same idea. In the Oura app, you can tap on the score to see how it is calculated:

Oura also provides a separate sleep score, with an overview of your sleep duration:

You can tap on this to see a detailed breakdown of your sleep stages:

Apple likely won’t make as much detail available, but the overall idea looks to be the same.

Is this useful data?

We don’t know how Apple plans to calculate your focus score, and how closely it might replicate the factors used by the Oura app, so we’ll need to wait and see.

However, I can say that I’ve been amazed at how well the Oura readiness score matches how I subjectively feel. That being the case, the most useful aspect of it for me has been to see how that score tracks over time, and the factors influencing it.

The Oura app uses AI to try to identify the key variables, and to make proactive recommendations based on these. For example, it identified that I get the best quality sleep when I go to bed sometime between 11pm and midnight, so that’s what I aim for as my normal routine.

I also found the sleep data reassuring when I suffered a bout of insomnia. My subjective feeling was that I was laying awake for hours in the middle of the night, but what the data showed was a different story – it was typically one hour maximum, and I had a healthy sleep cycle both before and after. I also got to see from good night’s sleep that, actually, it’s very typical for everyone to wake at some point in the night, it’s just that we often don’t remember doing so.

I could also see that I fell asleep faster when simply laying still in the dark than when I tried the advice sometimes offered to get up for a while and then go back to bed.

The best thing about this is that it ended the classic insomnia cycle: you can’t sleep, worry about the fact that you can’t sleep, and then that stress makes it hard to fall asleep. The data ended this for me, well, overnight. If I woke in the middle of the night, I just calmly waited to fall asleep again, and pretty soon the insomnia was gone.

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Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash