Well, I’ve had it.
Without turning this into another subscription thread, I grumbled along when Day One went subscription but bit the bullet: after all, I reasoned, they were offering cloud storage.
But I just can’t understand how this app can be considered well rounded and polished. The sync is a disaster: when I boot a device that hasn’t been used in a while, it creates duplicates all over the place. TextExpander breaks its Markdown syntax. And all manners of small bugs everywhere. Yes, the devs keep adding features but the existing ones are so flaky I am always afraid something will break.
I have moved to Diarly, offered in the Setapp subscription, and I’m very happy so far. It uses iCloud. It has end-to-end encryption. Its Markdown is basic but works. It’s not nearly as fancy as Day One but it works – and above all, it allows me to slash another subscription.
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I’m exiting Day One – and finding the export options lacking. Which is absolutely terrible in a journaling app, which needs to meet the highest standards of futureproofing.
Markdown journaling for me now. Maybe go to rich text (per a discussion on another thread) but at this point I’m thinking no.
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I did exactly the same last week after noticing that diarly through set app gives iOS also thanks to someone on here. Didn’t have any real issues with day one but equally didn’t get sufficient benefit to warrant the subscription.
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Oh, that I can answer! You can export to a zip and diarly will import.
2 mins I’ll go remind myself how to do it.
Ok so do this
Export as json and then settings > import in diarly and find the file created by day one. Worked first time for me.
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Thank you! Just found out that you actually must export journal per journal from Day One for Diarly to recognize them. Long process, but it works!
I managed to do 5 journals in one but don’t have the day one app anymore to see how I did it. Either way so long as it’s worked for you all good 
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Word of advice to you looking to move to Diarly: edit your Day One tags so that they are only in one word, without spaces. Diarly can’t do tags that have spaces, so it will make sure they import correctly.
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Can Day One entries be exported as plain text? I may do the same by changing to plain text and out of Day One.
Think so, the link above has it listed in the guide as an option.
My bad, I should have read the linked article before I asked my question.
I’m still pretty happy with Day One. But there are good alternatives like Diarly (included in SetApp!) and Journey. And MacJournal, which has been around for probably a decade, reverted to its original developer last year, who released it (or at least the latest version) for free. (He updated the Mac app, but I’m not sure the preexisting iOS syncs to it.)
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Well, it’s limping along, at any rate. For the last 5-6 years its UI and feature-set didn’t really change. MacJournal 6 came out in 2011, v6.22 came out last February, and v.7 was only released by Dan Schimpf when he regained the code last year. Mariner Software was in control of the app and its marketing for the last decade and they did very little with it, often milking $$ by bundling it in deals with other apps that also weren’t being actively supported.
It seems to be a solid free Mac app, but it’s not cross-platform (the iOS app out there doesn’t sync with the current Mac app IIRC), and if Dan isn’t charging for the app he’s obviously got to be spending his time on work that pays.
So I think it’s probably a good app if you are on the Mac and don’t want to pay anything. But I do most of my journaling with quick updates on my phone and couldn’t see myself switching from Day One to MacJournal.
just more greedy developers, taking your money and running, they think they are invincible because of the exposure they get on certain podcasts, their day of reckoning will come, Like thousands of others, I am totally sick of them!
I’ve had similar issues to yours with Day One. Sync between devices worked sporadically, and I found a few other odd bugs with templates and getting their Android app to recognise my Plus status.
I’m now doing my journalling in plain text. I started doing that with Ullyses, but have now moved to using iCloud Documents plus iA Writer.
Text is certainly an option if all you want to do is write text and nothing more. But I prefer to be able to location-stamp my entries (with weather), integrate images (and pull location metadata to view on a map), to see what happened On This day with a click, to have multiple journals (locked or not) separated by color, automatic backups, and automatically pull images from Instagram, tweets from Twitter and data from YouTube, Strava, and Facebook. Any while text is great as far as it goes, I enjoy using rich text formatting - bold and italics and lists and checkboxes. Day One also has features I don’t use but other do, like tags, and letting you integrate videos, drawings and audio, and transcribe audio, and even print books from individual journals.
I write in text/Markdown all day, but I don’t want my encrypted, backed-up, and end-to-end encrypted journals to be merely in text. If I left Day One it would be for another journaling app, but not text.
I switched to day one in January 2020 because everyone raved about it so much. Previously I always used my top selection for text apps, Usually ulysses. Every day for the last month I have been wishing that I had not
switched over, not because of sync problems but because of a proprietary interface that never made much sense to me. So back I switch. Based on another topic today in Mac power users, I may give IAwriter strong run
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I’m using iA Writer and I’m really liking it. I also like Ulysses but I don’t want to pay the subscription. With iA Writer and Scrivener I have all of my writing related needs met.
Recently bought an iPad. Really shocked by how buggy DayOne for iPad is. Have used the app on Mac and iPhone for years so switching would probably be a lot of work.
I’ve been using Day One for years and I’m backing away from it because I don’t like the proprietary storage format, export options, and its idiosyncratic interface.
I’m doing my journaling in DevonThink now and doing a lot more of it.
I’ve been thinking of using DEVONthink for this in a more focused way. What format are you using – RTF, markdown, formatted note, etc. – and are you using Sorter to capture notes?