Why should you keep a diary in the digital age? All the photos, voice notes, messages, calendars, etc.: Aren’t all the important information already on our smartphones? And aren’t many people already being tracked in all sorts of ways? What they eat, who they hang out with, how many calories they burned while running, what music they listen to while running, and so on? Yes! But that’s precisely why the conscious act of keeping a diary is more important than ever for many people today. These apps help with that.
At the end of 2023, Apple released its own vision of a modern diary app. Supported by machine learning, “Journal” makes suggestions for diary entries, for example selecting an image or video and asking users to add a reminder text. “Suggestions based on user activity include writing prompts that provide meaningful insights and daily reflection suggestions that help users focus on gratitude, kindness, meaningfulness and more,” the group explains the purpose behind its latest in-house app.
Apple has not only published a diary app with “Journal”, but also provides other developers with an interface called the “Journaling Suggestions API” that makes the relevant suggestions to their users. The popular journaling app “Day One” will also make use of this in the future, as its founder Paul Mayne explains: “We have integrated the Journaling Suggestions API into the Day One app to offer our users an even more comprehensive experience.”
The “Diary without advertising” app is only available on iOS devices. It is popular with many users because of its simplicity. The simply designed app focuses on the essentials, i.e. writing diary entries. If you want, you can make access more difficult with an additional password, as with most comparable apps.
Users of the “Diaro” app can do more than just write written diary entries. Here the written chapters can be accompanied by thumbnails from the photo gallery, given a mood and then divided into categories such as “Business”, “Love” or “Friends”. The app is available to download for free in the App Store and Playstore, but a fee is charged for the ad-free version with full functionality.
The app “1 Second Every Day” has less to do with traditional diary writing. Rather, it relies on photos and videos and, as the title of the app suggests, packs them into a single second every day. Over the course of a year, a video is created that can be bundled into a six-minute video every 365 days. The app can be downloaded free of charge for Android and iOS devices, but the creators ask you to pay for the full range of functions.
