Did we forget about this app?

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Apple's journal app quietly became one of my favorite apps on my iPhone and it did come to iPad as well. I had the opportunity to interview Craig Federiki about its addition to iPad amongst some other iPad updates in my interview with him at Dubdub if you want to check that out. I am walking through everything that makes the journal app so good because I think it's one of those apps that sounds really simple on the surface, but it's actually really thoughtfully designed because I also feel like it's an app a lot of people have forgotten about. So, Journal is Apple's builtin journaling app. And before you click off thinking you're not a journaling person, stick with me because the way Apple built this app genuinely lowers the bar for what journaling even has to be. Most journaling apps put you in front of a blank page and expect you to just start writing. And for a lot of people, including myself, that blank page is exactly why the habit doesn't stick. The journal app takes a completely different approach. Instead of it starting from nothing, it actually pulls in context from your day automatically. Your photos, your location, your workouts, your health data, and it uses all of that as a jumping off point. So instead of staring at a blank entry wondering what to write, you already have something that you can react to. This alone has changed the way I journal massively because it's a habit I can actually stick with now. And it becomes this little memory time capsule that I have thoroughly enjoyed looking back on, especially as a parent. If you're a big data nerd, there is some insights where at a glance you can see your daily and weekly streaks along with how many entries for the year, words that you have written, and so on. I also like this calendar view here because I can quickly see what days actually have an entry. You can also see the places connected to your entries here, too.

[00:01:49]What I find to be pretty interesting about journal is that you can actually categorize your entries by creating separate journals. It feels very similar to the setup of creating a new reminders list, but the colors, in my opinion, are much prettier. And you can actually even select a custom color, which you can't do in Apple reminders yet. Right. Right, Apple. And of course, choosing from the preset icons or the emojis list. I haven't leveraged the use of this feature much yet, though I will likely organize the entries by the year if I were to start, or just by life chapters.

[00:02:23]Maybe that's just a feature I need to kind of tap into a little more for myself. So, when you open journal, you will land on your entries feed a chronological log of everything that you have written. It's clean, it's minimal, and I think it's really beautiful to scroll back through over time. I love, love, love the simplicity here. At the very bottom, you have your new entry button, and that's where the magic really starts. When you tap to create a new entry, Journal immediately pulls up suggestions based on your day. And this is genuinely my favorite part of the entire app. It might surface a photo from your camera roll, a location that you visited, a workout that you logged in the health app, a song that you were listening to, or even a podcast episode.

[00:03:03]All of these become little prompts. You can tap into one and it populates into your entry with that context automatically. You can add as many or as few as you want and then you can write as much or as little as you want around that. Often times I would just put in the context of my day and have that be logged. For me, this usually just looks like opening the app at the end of the day, seeing a photo of something that I did, tapping it, maybe writing a few sentences about it, and being done. Or maybe not. Maybe just having just that context and that's it. Some nights it is three sentences. Some nights it turns into a whole page. Other times I just add the context it pulled from that day, the location that I went to, or the workout that I did. But the entry exists either way. And over time, I feel like that adds up to a really meaningful record of your life. If you want to go the more typical approach to journaling, let's say you want to have an entry that's less of here is what I did today and something more reflective. Journal does have prompts built in as well. You can browse them when creating a new entry. And they cover everything from gratitude to goals to memories. and it is a nice option to have when you want to go a little bit deeper, but you're not sure where to start for yourself.

[00:04:14]It's a great option for those who do want to dig a bit deeper into their journaling than I do. Okay, this is the feature that I want to talk about the most because I think it is the most underrated thing about this app. I don't journal every day. I never have. and I finally have stopped feeling guilty about it with Apple Journal is that even when I miss a few days or a week or even a whole month, I can still go back and create entries for those days because the app still has all of that data saved. So, let's say I had a really full week and I didn't open the app once and I have done this after a full month as well. I can sit down on a Sunday, whatever day, pull up journal and create an entry for Tuesday when I had that appointment or another one for Thursday when I took a photo of something I really love or something that I did for someone or another one on Saturday when we did something as a family. All of that location data, those photos, those moments, they are still waiting for me to act on. And then here's the part that makes it feel really intentional. you can actually update the entry date to match the actual date of that moment. So even though I'm writing it on say Sunday, it lives on my journal in the correct day that the moment happened. So my journal ends up being a genuine log of my life and not just the days that I remember to open the app, which I think is the most important feature of this app that sets it apart from other journaling apps that I have tried and have failed to stick with. Especially right now with being pregnant with a lot of the moments I want to remember and just pregnancy brain and chasing around a toddler, it really is hard to keep track of every little moment and every little thing that we do and just other little milestones that pop up. And knowing that there's going to be even more when I have another baby arrive, this feature feels especially meaningful to me. I don't want to misdocumenting things just because I didn't open up an app at the right time. journal also connects to your health data like I mentioned which I love as an optional layer. So if you logged a workout, you went for a walk, you hit a sleep goal, any of that can be pulled into an entry.

[00:06:21]You don't have to use it, but it is there if you want your journal to include more of that physical context alongside the personal. For me, it comes up naturally when I've had a really active day or when something health related felt significant enough that I want to note. I especially liked this feature when I was towards the end of my first pregnancy because I was swimming a lot of laps at the community college that I used to live near and there is just something incredibly satisfying about having that data appended to my entries. I was also able to add photos and videos and it's just a fun moment to look back on because it's kind of absurd to see this large pregnant woman doing these labs. That was really fun for me and I love looking back on those entries. Beyond the suggestions, you can add to any entry manually. Photos, voice memos, videos, your current location, all of that available right from the entry editor. The writing space itself, I feel, is just clean. It's distraction-free, and you can write as much or as little as you want, and I just feel like it's never cramped or limited with my journaling. There's also the moods feature where you can log how you're feeling with an entry, which is just a nice lightweight way to track your emotional state over time without it feeling like this huge thing, this huge mood tracker to keep up with.

[00:07:40]Because journaling can obviously be deeply personal, you can lock your journals. This is something new, I believe, from last year that was announced at WWDC. And here's how you do it.

[00:07:58]journal has a reflection streak built in that tracks how many consecutive days that you've made an entry. And I'll be honest, I have a complicated relationship with streaks and apps because they can start to feel more like pressure rather than the motivation that I need. What I appreciate about how Journal handles this is that it's very gentle. It sends you a soft notification reminder if you want one, but it doesn't punish you for missing a day in any dramatic way. The streak is there if it motivates you and is easy to ignore if it doesn't or you can simply turn off notification reminders to journal completely. So, all of this has been available on iPhone for a while, but WWDC25 brought Journal to the iPad, which is a big deal for anyone who does more of their reading and writing on iPad. And the reason why Journal was not brought to iPad originally, according to Craig, is that nearly everyone takes their phone with them everywhere. Your phone is what is tracking where you go, what you do, the way you move, the photos you take, and it pulls from that data to help you craft your journal entries.

[00:08:58]>> When we released the journal app for iPhone, the biggest single piece of feedback we got was people saying, "Hey, can you please bring it to iPad?"

[00:09:05]Journal on the iPhone has the option of noticing uh places you've been and things like that to inspire you with journal entries. You aren't necessarily bringing your iPad to all of those places. And yet when you get home and it's time to journal, >> you'd like to have that as part of your prompt to say, "Hey, we noticed you went here, here, and here. You spent time with these people. Maybe journal about it." And so we worked on the synchronization where your phone and iPad can communicate to each other privately.

[00:09:32]>> If the iPad did that, I'd have very, very few entries. Since I take my iPad to far less places than my phone during my typical dayto-day, it would essentially only track my work and family trips, which is not the only thing that I do want to track. So, for me personally, the iPhone version is still what I reach for the most at the end of the day because it's just right there on my nightstand and it takes 30 seconds. But having it on iPad now means that I can sit down on a slower morning, open a longer entry, and I can write more thoughtfully when I do have the time and space for it. The larger canvas, and of course, the screen real estate of the iPad suits those longer entries really well. It just feels better to write on because I can also combine it with my Magic Keyboard or just a regular keyboard. And it's also great if I want to quickly capture an entry on my phone, but then more fully flush it out later on my iPad. What's fun of course with iPad is that you have the Apple Pencil and you can of course physically write out journal entries or little notes as well. So having that experience is obviously much better suited on iPad than my phone if I of course want to use the Apple Pencil and write some logger entries out. If you're someone who does a lot on your iPad and you've wanted a journaling habit that actually fits into your life without much effort, having it native on the iPad also removes just one more friction point. Journal is one of those apps that I think works best when you just stop thinking of it as just a journaling app and start thinking of it as a way that you can record your life for yourself.

[00:11:05]Some days it's a photo in two sentences and other days is catching up on a whole week at once, which is something I do quite often myself and all of it still counts. If you haven't tried it yet or maybe you need that extra reminder of a wonderful free journaling option, I'd encourage you to open it tonight and just see what it suggests for you. You might be surprised how easy it is to actually start, even if journaling is a habit you've been terrible at sticking with, like myself. If you'd like to see a full tutorial and walkthrough of the journaling app, be sure to subscribe because app deep dives are some of my favorite videos to film. So, if you like this video and you want more, you will love my video all about Apple's Free Form, another underrated app by Apple, I feel. Or maybe you will want to see my deep dive into Apple calendar and reminders. That video especially is full of so many hidden tips and tricks and features. And so I will see you over there. And let me know in the comments if you'd like to see something for journal 2. Bye.