Apple introduces Journaling app for iOS

As previously rumored, as part of iOS 17’s set of new features that were announced today during today’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple has introduced a new app geared towards journaling. The app is aptly named “Journal” and it is being touted as the “new way to appreciate life’s moments.”

The Journal app for iPhone will use on-device machine learning throughout the day and provide suggestions and ideas to write about. The personalized suggestions will come from recent activity in your contacts, location, music, photos, podcasts, and workout apps, and provide scheduled notifications to remind you when it’s time to write.

Research suggests that journaling can be very beneficial on our mental health, with recent studies suggesting that writing down our experiences can help greatly reduce anxiety and even the amount of sick days we take off work. Additionally expressive writing and gratitude journaling has been known to promote self-acceptance and increase cognitive processing.

Apple is putting more work into releasing health-focused features, particularly with the introduction of a Health app on iPad, so it makes sense that a feature like this would be added as well. My only hope is that this app eventually makes it to MacOS as well without having it necessarily linked to an iPhone.iPhone users will have the ability to lock the app, which will use end-to-end encryption. Because of this Apple states that the app was built to protect the user’s privacy, thus no one except for the user will be able to access their journal entries.

So far, iPhone users have only been able to journal using third party apps, such as Day One, or by using the Notes app. However, because that functionality will now be available natively, we will have to wait and see how that will affect journaling apps currently on the app store.

Apple will also be providing a Journaling Suggestions API so that developers can take advantage of these suggestions within their own apps. Journal will be available on iOS 17 once it rolls out in the fall.