Journaling is a great exercise for your mental health and well-being, providing space for introspection and reflection while stretching your brain to use your writing skills.
However, it's not an easy habit to build and maintain; from remembering to keep your journal with you to struggling to fit journaling into your busy schedule, the modern world seems unaccommodating for pen-and-paper diaries.
Mobile app alternatives are nothing new, but iOS 17 will see a new first-party contender enter the fray: Journal. Apple's newest well-being app will use on-device machine learning to make personalized suggestions and guide you through your journaling.
What will Journal for iOS 17 do?
Journal will serve as a digital diary app allowing you to create multimedia snapshots of your day; whether through text, images, people, places, or even Apple Fitness activities and music.
Aggregating the forces of Apple's various iOS features and lifestyle apps, your journal entries will essentially become time capsules, and you can even bookmark certain days and memories to easily revisit later.
The app seems to be designed to combat some of the greatest challenges most people face when journaling. For instance, Journal gives text prompts asking questions about your day to help draw out your inner thoughts, which can help those who struggle with writer's block. If remembering to sit down and write in your journal is the problem, you can set up daily reminders.
The real standout feature with Journal, however, is its ability to make suggestions. Using on-device machine learning, Journal will suggest different recommendations for journal entries based on the activities logged on your iPhone throughout the day. So, if you visited a coffee shop with your friends and took a photo, these activities might appear as suggestions you can write about in your Journal app.
It almost seems like a blend of scrapbooking and journaling, but delivered through a simple and streamlined app.
Will my Journal entries be kept private?
Journal entries are, by nature, incredibly personal, and so any journaling app is bound to raise questions regarding user privacy. Thankfully, Apple is very hot on matters of privacy, so they've created Journal with security in mind.
By design, the app is private. As previously mentioned before, machine learning processing for suggestions and prompts happens on-device, and the app has end-to-end encryption.
If you're still not confident, you can also password-protect the app to keep your thoughts to yourself.
When can I download Journal for iOS 17?
Unlike other iOS 17 releases such as StandBy, it's fairly likely any iPhone that can run iOS 17 will be able to download Journal; the question is when?
All we know so far is that it will be available on iPhones with iOS 17 later this year, which we expect to mean September, judging by previous iOS releases. The public beta of iOS 17 will be available from July 2023, which we'd imagine will include Journal.
