The Apple Journal app is so simple that it felt like something was missing at first. The entire app consists of one screen. You’ll see a reverse chronological timeline of your diary entries and a big plus button at the bottom. When you press plus, you’ll see an overlay with some options. Tap New Entry at the top or respond to one of Journal’s Reflection prompts. “What can you do to make someone’s day better this week?” one of them asks. Another article says, “Write about a time when you found an unexpected solution to a difficult problem.”
When creating a diary entry, you can add photos and videos, record voice memos, and record the location associated with the entry. When viewing your timeline, you can filter to only see entries with photos or special entries you’ve bookmarked, but that’s about it. You can also have the app remind you to write in your diary every day. Actually, I don’t know what I expected from a journaling app from Apple, but it’s very… just a journaling app, and very basic at that.
As far as I know, there are two reasons for the existence of the Journal app, which was made available to iPhone users in iOS 17.2 and is currently in public beta. The first is that health is important to Apple as a company, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that keeping a regular diary in some way is a good thing. Second, in many ways, mobile phones are actually perfection A place to keep a diary — because you can keep a diary.
The big idea behind Apple Journal is to help your phone recognize what Apple calls “Moments.” It looks at where you’ve been, who you FaceTimed with, how many videos you took, and other signals that only your phone can access, and tells you that this is probably something you want to remember and revisit. I guess.Your phone is the only device that both of you know that you were on the phone with your boyfriend and girlfriend for an hour and Immediately after that, I heard 11 Dashboard Confessions songs in a row. It knows that you set a personal record in your marathon training today, and that you finished your run with a poor view from the top of a mountain. In theory, once you have access to all that information, Journal could start to put things together and not only add them to your personal timeline, but also encourage you to take a moment to reflect. But Apple hasn’t given any answers about how it works or which signals are important.
This is a very interesting idea. Especially since Apple is making this technology (which it calls the Suggestions API for Moments) available to other third-party journaling apps as well. All machine learning and processing happens on your device, and the apps you use get information about Moments only when you select them to add. (The only part of Journal that isn’t completely local is the iCloud backup, which is itself encrypted.)
It should also be said that it is a complete minefield. Remember when Facebook’s On This Day feature showed people horrifying memories they didn’t want to relive? Journal has access to even more data, so worse things could happen. there is. As my colleague Victoria Song wrote in June, “If your camera roll is anything like mine, it’s full of happy, calm, infuriating, empty, mundane, and depressing moments.” It’s a mess. It’s messy because life is messy. And if the Journal app is really a take on Apple’s Memories feature, it’ll be able to innocently store memories you don’t want or aren’t ready to see. They are more likely to ambush you.”
You have some control over the data that Journal uses to suggest moments, and you can even turn off moments completely if you want. But they’re all on/off switches, and it would be great to see Apple offer more fine-grained control in the future.
I’ve only been using Journal for a few days so far, so I can’t guarantee how it will work. Also, because I was never given the opportunity to use the Journal. (And I was taking creepy photos and listening to Taylor Swift the whole time!) But it’s interesting to see how Apple handles the Moment generation process, and what other apps will do to integrate the Suggestion API. It will be interesting to see how you choose or not. Third-party apps can’t directly insert their content into the Moments system, but data from apps that use SiriKit, CallKit, or HealthKit can be funneled into suggestions as well. Once again, the exact alchemy behind Moments remains somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Another way to get information into Journal is to use the Share Sheet on your iPhone. You can save links and media from the web and many other apps, and Journal saves rich links to the source. While the intent here seems good (you can play Spotify tracks directly in your journal timeline), the execution is off in places. (It doesn’t recognize that I’m a subscriber, it just starts the free preview.) In general, Journal is not, and is not intended to, replace a bookmarking app or read-later service. This app focuses on making it easy to create and review diary entries, so you can’t even use tags or folders.
At least for now, I suspect that while Journal may be appealing as an entry-level journaling app, it’s unlikely to convince many people to ditch their existing journals. (I’m a long-time Day One user, and there’s nothing about Journal that makes me want to switch.) It’s definitely true that your phone knows you like no other device, and Apple You’re probably right to figure out how to use it. improve your life.
But I always think about the times when I was sick in bed and my Apple Watch yelled at me to stand up, and I wondered how well my device actually worked. Masu. do know meAnd even my cell phone did it Understand correctly. Are we really just a collection of things we do on a screen, and is it our responsibility to teach our devices to understand us better? Is it the future?
I’m sorry for thinking so much about existential things. This often happens when I write in a diary a lot.