The Apple Watch could finally get an obvious missing feature – but not until 2020

For all of the potentially life-saving capabilities of the Apple Watch, it still falls short of being the ultimate holistic health-tracking solution for one major reason – the inability to track sleep.

That’s primarily down to the need to regularly charge the watch when it would be tracking your rest and also because Apple hasn’t developed a native feature designed for that purpose.

However, that could be about to change, according to a Bloomberg report, with sources claiming a sleep monitor could be added to a future version of the Apple Watch.

Those familiar with the matter say Apple has been testing the feature at secret sites near to its Cupertino HQ with a view to introducing the feature for the 2020 release of the Apple Watch.

Of course, in order for a reliable sleep tracking feature, Apple might need to include a battery capable of lasting multiple days, or one that charges much, much faster. Apple could also encourage users to simply charge their devices in the morning rather than overnight, in order to make sleep tracking possible.

Another possibility is that Apple may be able to include the sleep tracking functionally into a low power mode that wouldn’t drain the battery life too much.

Sleep tracking is becoming a major battle ground in the wearables field, with the importance of recovery increasingly seen as an important metric in measuring the body’s ability to take on strain from training or workouts without incurring injury.

With this development, Apple would be taking on the likes of Fitbit, which gives users powerful sleep-tracking metrics on screen and via the companion app.