William Gallagher’s thorough review of what Journal does and does not do at present.
During the review he mentions a data loss with Day One some time ago, which destroyed his and his wife’s trust in Day One and in her case, any electronic journaling.
Does anyone else have experience of this?
In my case I bought Day One before it became subscription, didn’t really use it, got mad at it when it went subscription and didn’t start journaling with it. Now I am starting an activity specific journal and trialling Day One and Agenda for it. Journal would also be a good fit for this if it synced via iCloud to my other Apple devices. Right now it’s iPhone only. So I’m still at the stage of testing the waters to see which of these options works for me.
It’s some time ago and the memory is hazy, but I had data loss with Day One.
I came back to it after Automattic took them over as they are experts in storing lots of peoples’ words online. I left it again when I had some (very minor) issues that I reported to find out they knew, had known for a while, but hadn’t changed their documentation or told anyone. They weren’t able to say if or when the issues would be fixed, either.
I’ve been using Diarly for well over a year now. Ten years of about 15 journals. It’s rock solid and updated regularly.
I have used Day One for many years. At one stage I experienced, effectively, data loss when I edited a number of very old entries in minor ways and the sync completely messed up those entries (the detail of which I cannot now recall).
I now use Day One exclusively on my MacBook Pro and do not use sync at all. All entries are regularly exported (as markdown) into DEVONthink which is where my 50+ years of diary entries now reside.
I recently resumed DayOne subscription to avail of the recently announced shared journal feature (doesn’t work on legacy accounts and need to pay full subscription price again).
I have tried other apps but this seems to be the only one with their own cloud storage with ability to upload various types of media which is important for my journaling.
The app remains slow and sync chokes my phone. There is no feature parity between phone, web and desktop apps. The app has hardly changed during the years that I was away and UI continues to look dated.
I’d really love Apple or someone else to deliver the excellent journalling experience I want. Day One, IMHO, does not always deliver on its promises, is languishing with issues (such as feature parity across phone, iPad and Mac) that have been there for years and badly needs a behind the scenes rewrite. I’ve written that it seems to be a cash cow for automattic - little sign that those subscriptions are going to improve it. It’s not more features it needs, but refinement and utter reliability.
Diarly works very well for me but it’s not quite as slick as Day One and there are some features I’d like (e.g. “on this day”), uses iCloud (which works very well but is a black box that might break someday). It does offer end-to-end encryption. The independent developer is super responsive, updates deliver useful features and refinements and I can back it up locally as markdown files.
I’m keeping an eye on Apple journal, but as a minimum it has to sync across my devices securely and let me get my writing out easily before I can take it seriously.
It has been a number of years ago, but I lost several months of data with Day One, so I just never trusted them again. I lost a lot of important (to me) information and thoughts. I’d like to try Journal, but my iPad doesn’t support it and I don’t like typing on my iPhone. Maybe down the line when I update my iPad.
I’ve started using Apple Journal on my iPad (running iOS26 beta), but as my MBA will not update to 26, I primarily use Everlog on my MBA, iPad and iPhone… I like it, but my journaling needs are minimal at this point
I don’t use Journal for writing, but I’ve been experimenting lately with capturing little moments — entries with 10-30 secs of audio, the location turned on, and maybe a photo. Great for travel, or just everyday experiences, when a cool thing is happening. Worth a 1000 words, as they say.
