iOS 17.2’s Journal app offers introspection, surface-deep
Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.
I’ve never really been someone who journals. At various points, I’ve tried: on and off throughout high-school and college, while I studied abroad, during a cross-country roadtrip, but these always seemed to peter out eventually. It’s led me to the conclusion that you’re either someone who can stick with keeping a journal or you’re not.
Though Apple may have great hopes for its new Journal app, I think it unlikely that it will transform the average person into an avid journal-keeper if they aren’t already. And, frankly, if they already are, I’m not sure Apple’s Journal app is going to sway those folks from their current journal of choice.
The Journal app was one of the big marquee announcements of iOS 17 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but like an increasing number of features announced as part of the company’s big annual software updates, it didn’t arrive with the initial release, instead getting pushed off to a subsequent update: iOS 17.2, which arrives today.
Like so many of Apple’s apps, Journal isn’t a wholly new idea: there are plenty of popular pre-existing journal apps for Apple’s platforms. But to set itself apart, Apple is applying the secret sauce—the fact that it is the platform owner and can leverage data that no third-party developer would ever have access to. That comes in the form of Journaling Suggestions, a machine learning-based feature that can gather all the data your iPhone has about you and try to synthesize it into a prompt for you to write about.
It’s a clever idea, and one that’s clearly meant to ease people into the habit of journaling by answering the age-old question “What do I write about?” But I’m not convinced it’s enough.
Journalist, not journal-er
I’ve been using the Journal app on the iOS 17.2 beta for several weeks now, and despite my best intentions—including not just turning on the notifications that gently remind you to journal, but even keeping the Journal app on my Home Screen—I’ve racked up a grand total of nine journal entries.
As I looked back over the entries that I’d made, I came to the conclusion that Apple has kind of done this feature already—and arguably better—in the Photos app. Journaling Suggestions seem to use the same algorithm that Photo’s Memories do, looking at pictures and videos taken within a certain time period or at a certain location, and grouping them together with a theme. (And, indeed, Memories are even surfaced within the app’s suggestions at times.) But Photos does this automatically1, presenting memories as a fait accompli for you to revisit, rather than waiting for users to actively go in and manually create them.
Where Journal aims to differentiate itself from Memories is from the ability to bring in other data, such as music or podcasts you listened to, your workouts, and so on. I’m not sure that makes sense to me: Personally, I don’t find those to be things that I’m particularly interested in journaling about, much less revisiting later. Do I really care that on October 30 my wife started listening to Christmas music?2
I did find myself wondering if allowing for more information to be imported might perhaps make the app more compelling. I’m surprised that there’s no integration with HealthKit data beyond the meager ability to see workouts you’ve done, which it summarizes with a static screenshot. Apple’s recent mood-tracking features would seem perfect for a journaling app, but they’re absent here. And, of course, info from third-party apps—say you listen to podcasts in Overcast and not Apple Podcasts—are a non-starter.
A simple journal for a more elegant age
What I do appreciate with Journal purely from a design perspective is its focus on simplicity. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles or hidden features here: when you launch the app, it shows you a reverse chronological list of your journal entries, provides a filter menu so you can see those entries only containing specific types of data (photos, videos, music & podcasts, activity, places, etc.) or those you’ve bookmarked, and has a big honking + button for creating a new entry. That’s about it.
The list view is pretty basic: You can’t really tap on entries, which is a little odd; instead, you tap on items within the entry. That’ll display the item and a little metadata, but there’s not much to do with it at that point. Again, I found myself wondering why I’d choose to go back and view a photo or video in the Journal app rather than in Photos.
Creating a new entry will both recommend events for you to journal about, or show you a list of your most recent events. In some cases this even brings in memories from Photos. There are also what Apple calls “Reflection” prompts that suggest ideas to journal about, but I honestly never found myself inspired to write more. (No small part of which was my reluctance to spend a long time typing out an entry with my thumbs, because I am old and I find that uncomfortable.) However, Apple says that other apps will be able to take advantage of this suggestions framework, which is perhaps the unusual best part of this whole feature: third-party journaling apps, the ones that people have actively bought or downloaded because they’re passionate about journaling, stand to get better.
When you’re composing a journal entry, you can bring in pictures from photos, add your location, take a picture with the camera, or even record an audio clip. There’s also access to journaling suggestions here too, so you can easily get to recent locations you’ve been to or media you’ve consumed.
All by myself
Ultimately, I found myself struck by the solitude of the Journal app. I get it, this is an introspective practice that one is supposed to do for oneself. There’s a reason that the Journal app is locked behind a biometric or passcode authentication. For me, personally, though, a big part of the joy of memories (and the capital ‘m’ Memories from Photos) is sharing them with other people. There’s no export options at all in Journal, no way to share them with anyone else other than to huddle around the same iPhone together. But that’s clearly the result of a deliberate choice Apple has made, and I can respect that decision, even if it’s not for me.
In the end, Journal feels a bit like Apple applied its trademark fixation on privacy to social networking: it’s a social network of one person, for one person. Which is perhaps admirable (and yes, oh-so-very Apple) in an age where we may spend way too much time broadcasting every thought we have. Can the Journal app steal time, attention, mindshare from the routine dopamine hits of the endless scroll? It might not be a bad thing if it did, but I think that the company has an uphill climb ahead of it. We’ll see if it can stay the course or if the Journal app finds itself a casualty of a world that’s moved online.
- Admittedly, with often mixed results, as our colleague Joe Rosensteel is fond of recounting. ↩
- Well, I mean, yes, I obviously do care, because that is way too early for any reasonable human to listen to Christmas music, but that’s not a fact I’m interested in either revisiting or saving for posterity. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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