Answers
The questions people actually type
One page per question, written to be useful even if you never install anything. Where the answer is no, it says no.
The engine, running on three real recordings, in your browser.
Nothing on these pages is medical advice and Firstsong is not a medical device. If you notice fewer movements than usual, call your midwife or maternity unit now, whatever any app or any page says.
These are the searches that bring people here, answered one at a time. Two of them matter more than the rest. Is it my heartbeat or the baby is the trap that catches almost everyone, and when can you hear a baby heartbeat is the question where the honest answer disappoints most people. Both are worth reading before you spend money on anything in this category.
- A recording is only worth keeping if the heart in it is the right one. Recordings that stay on your iPhone and in your own iCloud, saved next to the verdict that produced them, shared as a plain audio file, with no account anywhere.
- An app is not a doppler, and that is the whole point. A home doppler transmits ultrasound. A phone only listens. What the NHS says about using one at home, and what an app is honestly for instead.
- Anterior placenta and hearing a heartbeat at home. A placenta at the front sits between the microphone and the baby and soaks up the sound. What that changes, what actually helps, and what it does not mean.
- Are baby heartbeat apps safe. A microphone app puts nothing into your body, unlike a doppler. The physical answer is the easy half. The risk worth talking about is false reassurance.
- Do baby heartbeat apps work. Sometimes yes and often no. It depends on the week, the placenta, the room and the phone. Here are the measured detection rates, and what the category hides.
- How to actually listen at home. A quiet room, wired headphones and a phone flat on bare skin. Where to place it, how long to wait in each spot, and how to tell your own pulse apart.
- How to judge one of these apps without trusting anybody. No winner at the top of this page. Eight checks you can run on any app in this category in five minutes, what the reviews measure, and what the market charges.
- Is it my heartbeat or the baby. Your pulse is the loudest thing in your belly, and doubled it lands right in the fetal range. Why apps fall for it, and the wrist test that settles it.
- What a baby heartbeat app actually is. A baby heartbeat app is a microphone and a filter, not a doppler. How the category really works, why most of them disappoint, and what we measured first.
- What it actually sounds like when a phone finds it. A muffled double knock under 200 Hz, not the clean gallop of a doppler. What a phone can pick up through a belly, why headphones are required and why a cable wins.
- What makes this an iPhone app, and not yet an Android one. Why iOS first, where the microphone actually sits on your iPhone, and why the call optimized capture path deletes the exact band a small heart lives in.
- When you can hear a baby heartbeat at home. A phone is a third trimester instrument. What the public data shows from week 28 on, why nothing is promised earlier, and the strangest chart in this category.
Or skip the reading and test the engine
Three real recordings from a public research database, decided live in your browser. One is a baby, one is a mother, one is nothing at all. It takes about a minute and proves more than any page here can.
No account, no upload, no cookie.
The longer pieces
Six of the questions above needed more than a page. Those live in Reading, and the one most people arrive at in the middle of the night is what that silence actually means.
One email, the day it opens
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Last checked 2026-08-23