Apple Journal vs deariary: when the built-in app isn't enough
Apple’s Journal app does one thing exceptionally well. You open it at the end of the day, and instead of a blank page, you see a set of suggestion cards. A photo from the café you visited at lunch. A workout you finished before dinner. The song that played while you walked home. Apple calls these Journaling Suggestions, and they are genuinely clever.
Tap a card, write a few sentences, save. Done. On a day when you have something to say, it is one of the most frictionless journaling experiences ever shipped.
The catch is still the same catch: you have to write those sentences. And if you are the kind of person who keeps downloading journal apps and then stops using them, the suggestion is not the problem. The typing is the problem.
This is a comparison between Apple Journal (a free, on-device, iPhone-first app that surfaces moments for you to write about) and deariary (a web app that assembles the entry itself from the services you already use). They are aimed at similar readers. They solve different halves of the problem.
What Apple Journal does well
Apple launched Journal in December 2023 with iOS 17.2. It was iPhone-only at first, which made it an odd fit for anyone who worked at a computer. That changed in 2025: Journal now runs on iPad with iPadOS 26 and on Mac with macOS Tahoe 26, with iCloud sync across all three. For people inside the Apple ecosystem, it is finally a real cross-device journal.
On-device suggestions from your own data. Journaling Suggestions pull from places you visited, photos you took, workouts you logged, music you played, contacts you spent time with, and more. The grouping is smart: a prompt might combine photos from a specific location with the playlist you were listening to and the workout you recorded in the same window. Everything is processed locally on the device. Suggestions can be filtered or turned off by type in Settings → Privacy & Security → Journaling Suggestions.
Privacy as a default. Apple Journal does not require an account. It stores entries locally, syncs through iCloud, and works with Advanced Data Protection for end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups. Entries can be locked behind Face ID, Touch ID, or your device passcode. For people who care about where their diary data lives, this is one of the strongest privacy models in the category.
Rich multimedia. Photos, videos, audio recordings, and (on iPad) Apple Pencil drawings and handwritten notes. You can tag entries with location, attach moods through State of Mind, and starting in iOS 18, split your writing across multiple journals (personal, work, travel, and so on).
Free. No subscription, no one-time purchase, no upsell. It is a first-party app that ships with iOS.
The iPad and Mac experience is now real. The iPad version adds a map view for browsing entries by location and the ability to write with Apple Pencil. The Mac version means you can journal at a keyboard, which matters for longer entries. With iCloud sync, an entry started on iPhone finishes on Mac without friction.
Taken together, Apple Journal is a carefully designed piece of Apple software. The suggestion model respects your data, the multimedia support is first-rate, and the price is zero. For an iPhone user who wants to start journaling, there is no better on-ramp.
Where Apple’s boundary starts to matter
The limits of Apple Journal come from where it draws its walls.
Apple devices only. If you use an iPhone plus a Mac, or an iPhone plus an iPad, Journal now works. If you use an Android phone, a Windows laptop, a Linux workstation, or access anything through a web browser on a device you do not own, Journal is not available to you. There is no web version. Apple has not announced Android support, and the suggestion engine depends on Apple’s on-device frameworks, which makes a non-Apple port unlikely.
Suggestions come from the Apple ecosystem. Journaling Suggestions are powerful because they know what your iPhone knows: Photos, Health, Music, Maps, Contacts, and Calendar. That is a lot of surface area, but it is also the surface area’s outer edge. If you spent your day pushing code on GitHub, answering threads in Slack, closing tickets in Todoist, or posting to Bluesky, none of that shows up as a suggestion card. The work your phone did not witness does not get surfaced.
The writing is still on you. Journaling Suggestions help you remember what happened. They stop before the keyboard. You still tap a card, face a cursor, and write the entry yourself. On a day when you have energy for that, the suggestion is a gift. On a Tuesday when you fall asleep with your phone in your hand, the suggestion stays unanswered and tomorrow brings a new one.
No third-party integrations. Apple Journal does not connect to services outside Apple’s own. There is no plug-in architecture, no webhook inbox, no developer-facing API for pulling in work data. The developer-facing framework Apple ships is the opposite direction: it lets other journaling apps consume Apple’s suggestions. Apple Journal itself only looks at Apple-owned signals.
Export is limited. You can print and export individual entries, but there is no full-archive export to Markdown, JSON, or a standard format that other tools can read. Your journal is portable in the sense that iCloud moves it between your Apple devices. It is less portable in the sense of leaving Apple.
None of these are bugs. They are consequences of the product being built by a platform company for its own platform. That consistency is why Apple Journal works as well as it does. It is also why it stops where it stops.
How deariary approaches the same problem
deariary is a web app, not a platform app. It runs anywhere there is a browser, which means iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, and an iPad with a keyboard all see the same diary. There is no suggestion card to tap, because the composition step has already happened by the time you open it.
Instead of surfacing moments for you to write about, deariary connects to the services where your day actually happens: Google Calendar, GitHub, Slack, Todoist, Bluesky, Steam, Last.fm, Trakt, Swarm, Toggl Track, and anything else through a webhook. That data goes into a language model that composes the entry overnight, so the previous day is drafted before you wake up.
An Apple Journal user ending a Monday sees: a suggestion card with three photos from the office, a 32-minute walk, and two tracks from a focus playlist, waiting for the user to write about them. A deariary user ending the same Monday sees nothing, because the entry will not appear until morning. When it does, it reads something like: “Sprint planning kicked off the morning at 10, then a design review where the team decided to postpone the dashboard redesign. Two pull requests went in on the notification service, and the Todoist queue lost four items between lunch and the end of the day. A 32-minute walk at 6 in the evening, soundtracked by an ambient playlist, closed things out.”
The prose is plain. It does not have the texture Apple’s photo grid gives you. But it also does not require you to sit down and compose anything. The trade-off is honest: you give up the writing act, and you get the entry whether or not you showed up.
At a glance
| Apple Journal | deariary | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | iPhone, iPad, Mac | Web (any device with a browser) |
| Non-Apple devices | No | Yes |
| Account required | No (uses your Apple ID / iCloud) | Yes |
| Data processing | On-device for suggestions, iCloud for sync | Server-side composition |
| End-to-end encryption | Yes, via Advanced Data Protection for iCloud | No (server-side AI processing) |
| What fills the page | Suggestion cards (you still write) | Full diary entry generated for you |
| Sources for suggestions / entry | Photos, Health, Music, Maps, Contacts, Calendar (Apple services only) | GitHub, Slack, Google Calendar, Todoist, Bluesky, Steam, Last.fm, Trakt, Swarm, Toggl, Discord, Linear, webhooks |
| Third-party integrations | None | Yes (13 live, more via webhooks) |
| If you skip a day | No entry, no suggestion consumed | Entry still appears |
| Rich media | Photos, videos, audio, drawings (manual capture) | Photos, videos, highlights, and locations auto-collected from connected services |
| State of mind / mood | Yes | No (events, not emotions) |
| Multiple journals | Yes (iOS 18+) | No |
| Export | Per-entry print/export | Export available |
| Pricing | Free | Subscription (see pricing) |
Two ideas about what a diary tool should do
Apple Journal and deariary start from the same observation (people want to remember their days, but blank pages stop them) and split in opposite directions from there.
Apple’s answer is: the data belongs to you, and so does the writing. Journaling Suggestions are local, private, and optional. They help you remember, but they do not speak for you. The entry that ends up in the journal is the one you typed, in your own voice, on your own time. The app’s role is to be a good first-party companion to the ecosystem you already live in.
deariary’s answer is: the writing step is where the habit dies, so remove it. The data from your tools becomes the entry, not a reminder to make an entry. The app’s role is to be a layer that produces the record of the day whether you participate or not. The voice is not yours. The record exists.
Both answers are valid. They just aim at different reasons for keeping a diary in the first place.
Who should use which
Use Apple Journal if you live entirely inside Apple devices, you want a free and privacy-first option, and the thing you need help with is remembering what happened. If a suggestion card showing photos and a workout is enough to get you to type two sentences, Apple Journal is close to a perfect tool. The on-device model means your journal never touches a server that is not yours. The multimedia support means a photo, an audio clip, or a Pencil sketch can stand in for words when words will not come. For someone who enjoys the writing act and only needs nudges, this is the most polished journal app Apple has ever shipped.
Use deariary if you work across platforms, your life happens in services Apple Journal cannot see (GitHub, Slack, Todoist, Bluesky, a calendar that is not iCloud), or the writing step itself is where your journaling habit keeps breaking. If you have downloaded three journaling apps in the last year and stopped using all of them for the same reason (you were tired at the end of the day), a suggestion card is not going to fix that. Removing the composition step might.
Apple Journal is the best journal app for people who want help writing. deariary is for people who want the writing done.
Starting
If Apple Journal sounds right, it is already on your iPhone. Open it, allow Journaling Suggestions, and try tapping one card a day for a week. See whether the nudge is enough.
If you want to see what an automatic diary looks like, connect one integration at deariary.com on the free plan and read yesterday’s entry tomorrow morning. If the reading part works for you, the writing part stops being the bottleneck.
Both tools want you to end up with a diary you will actually read months later. The difference is where the cursor stops waiting for you.
