Apple’s Journal app, which was announced as part of iOS 17 at Apple WWDC earlier this year, is officially now available with the latest iOS 17.2 update.
The iPhone app is designed to help you reflect and practice gratitude through journaling, which has been shown to improve wellbeing. With Journal, you can capture and write about everyday moments and special events in your life, and include photos, videos, audio recordings, locations, and more to create rich memories.
On-device machine learning provides private, personalized suggestions to inspire journal entries, and customizable notifications help you develop your writing habits. With the new Journaling Suggestions API, third-party journaling apps can also suggest moments for you to write about.
“We are excited to bring the benefits of journaling to more people,” says Bob Borchers, Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Journal makes it easy to preserve rich and powerful memories, and practice gratitude by intelligently curating information that is personal to the user, right from their iPhone. And we’re making it possible for other journaling apps to offer the same personalized suggestions while maintaining the highest level of privacy.”
To get started, just log a simple text entry, or add rich details like photos, videos, locations, or audio recordings for more context. You can also add content like a news article, music, or a podcast from other apps by bringing it into the Journal app and writing about it. Browse past entries, bookmark them, or filter for details like photos, workouts, places, and more. Scheduled notifications can help make journaling a consistent practice as well.
Intelligently curated personalized suggestions are designed to help you remember and write about a moment, like new places you’ve visited, photos you’ve taken, songs you’ve played, workouts you’ve completed, and more. Suggestions based on activity include writing prompts to empower meaningful insights, and daily reflection prompts to help you focus on gratitude, kindness, purpose, and more. You control the type of content that appears in Suggestions and can create a journal entry with the Suggestions you choose.
In addition, developers can use the new Journaling Suggestions API to add personalized journaling suggestions to their apps, prompting users with moments to write about in a privacy-preserving way.
“The Journal app is an exciting development for us because it introduces the benefits of digital journaling to a wider audience and ushers in a new chapter for the practice,” comments Paul Mayne, founder of the journaling 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.”
When iPhone is locked with a passcode, entries in the Journal app are encrypted. Additionally, you can choose to enable secondary authentication, and lock the Journal app with your device passcode, Face ID, or Touch ID. All Journal entries are end-to-end encrypted when stored in iCloud, so only you can access them. Journaling suggestions are created on device, and you can choose which suggested moments are shared with the Journal app and added to Journal entries.
Journal and the Journaling Suggestions API are available with the release of iOS 17.2, which is available now.