- Two pages a day — a morning column and an evening one — asking the questions you chose, not the ones an app picked for you.
- Widgets on the Home Screen and the Lock Screen, a writing streak, and charts that find your patterns without you keeping a spreadsheet.
- Syncs through your own iCloud, and comes back out as a CSV, a printable book, or a backup you put a password on.
Where your data goesYour own iCloud
Everything it does
youriPhone
Nothing here
no account · no server · no one in between
youriCloud
youriPhone
Nothing here
no account · no server · no one in between
youriCloud
Who this is for
For anyone who wants to think twice a day — once in the morning, once at night — and keep it entirely to themselves. It needs nothing but an iPhone or iPad.
It will suit you if you have bounced off journalling apps that wanted an account with them, a subscription, or a look at what you wrote. It will not suit you if you want a journal you can share: it syncs through your own iCloud and nowhere else, so there is no mechanism for letting anyone else in, including me.
How to set it up
- 01Download it from the App Store and open it. There is nothing to buy. The only sign-in is Sign in with Apple, which unlocks the app rather than opening an account with me.
- 02Answer the prompts it comes with, or open Edit and replace them with the questions you actually want to think about.
- 03Optionally, allow it to read sleep, steps, and exercise minutes from Apple Health, so you are not retyping what your devices already recorded. It only ever reads from Health.
- 04Sign in to iCloud on your other Apple devices and the journal follows you there. There is nothing else to configure.
What it does
- Every prompt is yours
- Add, rename, reorder, retype or remove any field, so the questions are the ones you actually want to think about. Removing a prompt never erases your history: past days keep the prompts they were written with, and you can bring a removed prompt back — it tells you how many answers it is still holding.
- A morning column and an evening one
- Intentions, gratitude and to-dos in the morning; meals, movement, mood and thoughts at night. Those halves are the only fixed ideas in the app — everything inside them you decide, and you choose how many to start with.
- Answered however the question suits
- Short text, long text, numbers, sliders, time pickers, single- and multi-select choices, checklists, a tap-to-count tracker that is good for glasses of water, and a stopwatch. Plus a photo of the day, a question of the day that changes each morning, and recurring tasks that turn up only on the days they are due.
- Widgets on your Home Screen
- Five: today's to-do list, a counter, a goal, your writing streak, and a timer. The to-do list and the counter are tappable on the widget itself, without opening the app.
- The streak, a goal and the timer on the Lock Screen
- Those three come in Lock Screen sizes as well. They are read-only there — an accessory widget takes no buttons — and the timer keeps counting with the app closed, banking an overnight run against the right day.
- On iPad, and it takes handwriting
- Two columns on an iPad, one on a phone. Write into any text field with Scribble and it becomes text. With a keyboard attached, Tab moves between fields and Space checks things off.
- It reads Health so you don't retype
- Sleep, steps and exercise minutes fill themselves in, if you connect it. It only ever reads — never writes — it is entirely optional, and the app works fully without it. It finds your real overnight session rather than counting an afternoon nap.
- Charts, streaks and a search worth having
- The Insights tab surfaces your consistency and your trends over time, so patterns show up without you keeping a spreadsheet. If you switch it on, it will also compare two of your own numbers — sleep against mood, say — and tell you when they moved together, worked out on your device and never sent anywhere. Search looks back through everything you answered, not just the dates.
- Reminders that come from your own phone
- Optional morning and evening nudges, and the Weekly Recap that rounds off your week. They are the only things the app will ever send you, they are written on your device, and no push server is involved.
- Sign in with Apple is a lock, not an account
- It keeps the journal to you on a shared device, and what it leaves behind is an anonymous identifier on that device. I never receive a name, an email or a password, because there is nowhere to send one.
- Yours to take back out
- A CSV for a spreadsheet, a printable PDF book of your days, and a full backup you can put a password on. And a delete that genuinely deletes. A journal should never be trapped in an app.