Apple has introduced its new ‘Journal’ app on iPhone, designed to help users in practicing gratitude and reflection through journaling.
Launched with iOS 17.2 today, Journal allows users to document daily experiences and significant life events, enriching entries with photos, videos, audio recordings, and locations. The app leverages on-device machine learning to offer private, personalized entry suggestions, while customizable notifications aim to cultivate regular journaling habits.
Additionally, the new Journaling Suggestions API enables third-party apps to propose journaling topics.
“We are excited to bring the benefits of journaling to more people,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing in a statement on Monday. “Journal makes it easy to preserve rich and powerful memories, and practice gratitude by intelligently curating information that is personal to the user, right from their iPhone. And we’re making it possible for other journaling apps to offer the same personalized suggestions while maintaining the highest level of privacy.”
Journal simplifies starting a journal entry, whether it’s a basic text note or an enriched entry with multimedia elements. Users can integrate content from other apps, such as news articles or podcasts, into their Journal entries. The app also allows users to review past entries, bookmark favourites, and filter for specific details like photos or locations.
Personalized suggestions in the app are intelligently curated from a user’s recent activities, including photos, locations, workouts, and more. These suggestions come with writing prompts to encourage meaningful reflection. Users have full control over the content that appears in their suggestions and can create journal entries based on their preferences.
“The Journal app is an exciting development for us because it introduces the benefits of digital journaling to a wider audience and ushers in a new chapter for the practice,” said Paul Mayne, founder of the journaling app Day One. “We have integrated the Journaling Suggestions API into the Day One app to give our users an even richer experience that puts privacy at the forefront, and we can’t wait for them to try it.”
It’s interesting that Apple has a quote from Day One, which is a paid journaling app that Journal looks to likely replace.
Apple says Journal prioritizes user privacy, with entries encrypted on locked iPhones and end-to-end encrypted when stored in iCloud. Users can also opt for secondary authentication to lock the Journal app with their device passcode, Face ID, or Touch ID. Journaling suggestions are generated on the device, ensuring that users’ personal moments remain private and secure.
