UPDATE
12 December 2023
Apple launches Journal, a new app to reflect on everyday moments and life’s special events
Journal, a new iPhone app available today, helps users reflect and practise gratitude through journalling, which has been shown to improve wellbeing. With Journal, users can capture and write about everyday moments and special events in their lives, and include photos, videos, audio recordings, locations and more to create rich memories. On-device machine learning provides private, personalised suggestions to inspire journal entries, and customisable notifications help users develop their writing habits. With the new Journaling Suggestions API, third-party journalling apps can also suggest moments for users to write about. Journal and the Journaling Suggestions API are available with the release of iOS 17.2.
“We are excited to bring the benefits of journalling to more people,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Journal makes it easy to preserve rich and powerful memories, and practise gratitude by intelligently curating information that is personal to the user, right from their iPhone. And we’re making it possible for other journalling apps to offer the same personalised suggestions while maintaining the highest level of privacy.”
Capturing Life’s Moments
With Journal, it’s easy to get started by logging a simple text entry, or adding rich details like photos, videos, locations or audio recordings to add more context. It’s just as easy to add content like a news article, music or a podcast from other apps by bringing it into the Journal app and writing about it. Users can browse past entries, bookmark them, or filter for details like photos, workouts, places and more. Scheduled notifications can help make journalling a consistent practice.
Personalised Suggestions and Reflection Prompts
Intelligently curated personalised suggestions are designed to help users remember and write about a moment — like new places they’ve visited, photos they’ve taken, songs they’ve played, workouts they’ve completed and more. Suggestions based on user activity include writing prompts to empower meaningful insights, and daily reflection prompts help users focus on gratitude, kindness, purpose and more. Users control the type of content that appears in Suggestions and can create a journal entry with the Suggestions they choose.
In addition, developers can use the new Journaling Suggestions API to add personalised journalling suggestions to their apps, prompting users with moments to write about in a privacy-preserving way, so more people can benefit from journalling and the personalised, secure experience only iPhone can deliver.
“The Journal app is an exciting development for us because it introduces the benefits of digital journalling to a wider audience and ushers in a new chapter for the practice,” said Paul Mayne, founder of the journalling 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.”
Keeping Entries Personal and Private
Journal is built with privacy at its core. When iPhone is locked with a passcode, entries in the Journal app are encrypted. Additionally, users can choose to enable secondary authentication, and lock the Journal app with their device passcode, Face ID or Touch ID. All Journal entries are end-to-end encrypted when stored in iCloud, so that no one but the user can access them. Journalling suggestions are created on device, and users can choose which suggested moments are shared with the Journal app and added to their Journal entries.
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