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Apple will launch a journaling app

101 points by isaacdl 3y ago

xwdv 3y ago
Bad news for devs but good news for users and their mental health. Many people who didn’t even know about the benefits of journaling will now have a new app on their phone to help introduce it to them.
heavyset_go 3y ago
> It could monitor users' activities through the day in ways other apps can't. Nice, so even if users wanted to benefit from competition between Apple's and others' services, they can't because Apple blesses their software on iOS in ways that others' aren't.
- mrzimmerman 3y ago
  That’s definitely true but I don’t think it’s that simple. I love some of the apps that are iOS native and how their preferential treatment makes everything work with security I trust. BUT, I still prefer Google Maps, non-Safari browsers, Spotify over Apple Music, Feedly/my browser over Apple News. I agree that it’s problematic that apps made by the OS developer receive preferential treatment, but I haven’t personally found that to mean that the experience is better than third party apps.
- judge2020 3y ago
  If you bless some app with private permissions that allow it to do what Apple's competing app can do wrt whole-OS tracking, you now need a contract, some level of source code access, and a lot of time dedicated to reviewing what goes into that software to ensure the company isn't beaming it (even accidentally) to a third-party like FB via the FB SDK, and then Apple needs to make the decision "do we allow them to store this in their servers, or do we force them to do it on-device?". In every situation, it makes more sense to segment and triage private APIs for a promotion to a public API with user-friendly permission prompts and controls to protect the user's data.
  - josephd79 3y ago
    Why? They don’t review every app you install on your MacBook.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  When 3rd party App Stores comes, people will reverse engineer those features and creates applications which can do exactly same thing.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    That’s not how sandboxes work.
suddenexample 3y ago
On the topic of Apple building an uneven playing field that disadvantages third party apps - I want an iPhone but don't want to use Apple's services, so I'm sticking with Android for now. It just seems difficult to have an iPhone without suffering from Apple's handicapping of superior third party experiences. This is in contrast to Macs, which are absolutely top-notch pieces of hardware that would like you to use Apple services, but don't shove them down your throat.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  iPhone is worse in that way than macOS . You can pretty much use macOS as a Unix-like
- hedora 3y ago
  After trying a degoogled android device, I switched back to iOS. If you decide to keep things like location on device and disable ad telemetry on both platforms, you’ll find the third party iOS ecosystem is much stronger. (On Android, this leads to random apps closing at start with NullPointerException when they request unnecessary Google services.) I’d prefer a FOSS phone ecosystem, but sometimes pragmatism wins out.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    I would switch to an iPhone if I could get NewPipe, Firefox, and root-level ad blocking. Those are the killer features that make me keep my degoogled Android phone, despite the horrendous quality of most Android apps.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    In my experience the apps bundled with AOSP-based Android distributions aren't all that great either. Technically functional but most people are going to want Google versions instead.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  An iPhone without iCloud is so much better than an Android phone without a Google account.
npunt 3y ago
I'm actually quite excited by this, or at least the potential of this. The first and most exciting part of this is the ability to have a 'day in the life' consolidated ledger of our activities on device, across all app experiences. The ability to log our lives and add our own thoughts on top of it is important for self-reflection and for the many moments we want to recall using temporal cues and in context (I remember I was talking to Joseph and then saw a really cool webpage). A lot of the time the act of journaling is writing about the activity that has transpired on/through our devices (who we spoke with, what we did, etc), yet currently there is no affordance to link these together. We may add a note in a calendar event to remind ourselves of what happened, or rely on our memory, but just to look back at our day we have to cobble together a mix of calendar, notes, messages, etc; it's all a very disjointed experience. A consolidated journal/ledger of the day with the ability to write atop it is essentially the user-facing version of what a future AI assistant would see and present to users. A good assistant would not just do tasks but solicit our feelings and attune to us, which is essentially 'journaling' when brought into UI form. This whole product is frankly quite a bit overdue. The second value-add of this idea is tying journaling closer to Health. Health journaling is essential to managing chronic conditions, as its value is primarily retrospective discovery of trends. There's a lot of sub-par health journaling solutions out there, and none do a good job weaving themselves into the context of Health data. I hope to see this use case in this initiative. The history of our usage of devices has always remained a largely unexplored area of computing, and one of the major divergences between how people see the world and how computers present the world to us. Bringing history back to us in human-consumable form is important to get this sense back. The only other initiative that I see taking on this need is rewind.ai, which is quite exciting and I'm guessing is on Apple's short list of potential acquisitions. Finally this seems like the next step in the feature trajectory of adding context to our device usage. The first feature in this trajectory was Apple's Shared with You framework [1], which is about adding contextual data tags to activity (E.g. seeing a webpage in Safari showing at the top that it's shared by your friend Joseph, which reminds you of why its relevant). (FWIW I've spent the last year designing an OS for a new tablet platform with journaling as a central experience) [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou
- 3y ago
paxys 3y ago
> The app will be pre-installed on all iPhones that run iOS 17, and it will deeply integrate with location services, contacts, and more on the user's phone. > It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends. Basically a big FU to all the independent devs trying to compete on a fair playing field.
- mertd 3y ago
  Remember when it was a very big deal when a certain company pre installed a certain app in their OS?
  - ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
    Is this a Microsoft Internet Explorer reference?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - judge2020 3y ago
      I'm not sure why it's a "remember when". Every android phone you could buy at Best Buy today will have preinstalled, unremovable apps.
    - josephd79 3y ago
      That’s what i thought.
  - gcheong 3y ago
    Yes and this should be too as should Amazon be barred from making and selling its own products based on data collected through its marketplace.
    - josephd79 3y ago
      I agree. F that shit.
programmarchy 3y ago
It seems like Apple is trying to build a “healthy” social media platform (perhaps social experience is a better term). I could see them pulling this off pretty well, and would love if this took away oxygen from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the toxic systems out there.
smegger001 3y ago
on one hand that sucks for now competing developers of journaling apps. on the other any time a OS developer builds a new first party app they will be competing with other developers does that men they shouldn't make any other apps or improve the os in a way the another developer as app that fixes? no of course not. the question is how to balance it. My 'if i were god-emperor for a day' answer is to not give first party apps any access to restricted api or any preferential access to restricted permissions/data
_8j50 3y ago
Why can't I have iOS but without all the loss of control and privacy. For $1k/device can't someone establish a healthy competitor to iPhones that isn't low quality like android? The crappy deal these days is you can't have a phone that only calls and texts period. Forget UI and all that. 4G modem and an OS that displays UI for calling and texting with formally verified E2E encryption for both with no plans to offer any features outside of this period! I would buy that in a heartbeat.
- brookst 3y ago
  Sounds like you've identified a market need. Looking forward to what you make!
- foogazi 3y ago
  > I would buy that in a heartbeat. You and not many other people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - _8j50 3y ago
    Criminals and anyone wanting a guarantee of security(politicians, lawyers, journalists,etc...). It would be an alternative to signal, because unlike apps it would guarantee your device will not be compromised. The entire OS is call and text. Period.
- robjan 3y ago
  Isn't that what Pixel devices are supposed to be?
andrewjl 3y ago
Is this the whole story? Seems really at odds with Apple's strategy for Device Activity[1], available only as a first-party feature at first but in iOS 14 also becoming available as an API to third party apps. I see a parallel between a journaling app and HealthKit[2], where the latter is like basically a health and exercise journal for things like step counts[3] and medications[4]. It could follow a similar trajectory and eventually be made available as an API to third-party apps. [1](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity) [2](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit) [3](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquantitytypeidentifier/1615548-stepcount https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquanti...) [4](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinicaltypeidentifier/2976211-medicationrecord https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinic...)
fsflyer 3y ago
I'm hoping it's targeted towards folks that have intermittent issues. HealthKit has fields defined to store some information about various physical and mental symptoms and also nutrition, but there isn't a good way to populate the fields in iOS 16 and earlier. Some of the fields have been around since iOS 8, but Apple has regularly added to the list through iOS 16. Even if the app doesn't do any correlation, it will be very helpful to have the data collected into HealthKit so your health care provider has good data to work with.
- daydream 3y ago
  FoodNoms is an excellent food tracking app that populates nutrition information in HealthKit. It’s also an excellent iOS-native app. (No connection other than being a very happy customer.)
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Gave it a try, since I've been looking for such a thing to replace my pen & paper solution. Unfortunately, it seems somehow broken. When I tried adding a meal, it just failed silently.
asjldkfin 3y ago
This is good news. For those who don't know, journalling apps universally suck. Especially when it comes to security. Day One, the canonically recommended app, doesn't even locally encrypt their entries, so basically anybody can access it despite the veneer of a password on the app.
- syrrim 3y ago
  Apple has full disk encryption across all their devices, no?
martin_drapeau 3y ago
Journaling is a good way to accumulate training data for the AI to understand the behavior of the device owner. I suppose that is the purpose.
Animats 3y ago
All that tracking data will be sent back to the mothership. First, Apple will deny that there's data collection. Then they will say they're keeping the data private. Then they will say it's being only being used for "anonymous tracking". Then it will come out it's being sold for marketing purposes. "It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends." That could be really useful for tracking down illegal immigrants, gays, and politicians meeting with lobbyists.
- andrewbarba 3y ago
  It will, most definitely, be end to end encrypted along with the rest of user data in the iCloud ecosystem.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Unless you live in China*. * https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
  - handsclean 3y ago
    iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted: name, home address, work address, who you talk to and when, where you go and when, what you buy and when… iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted unless you find and change multiple different settings that few people know about: files, photos, notes, texts, full copies of laptop’s and phone’s storage… I’d take a bet that 99% of the time Apple or a local regime wants to read iCloud user data, they can.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      I’m almost sure that billing informations are required by law in plenty jurisdictions to be stored, where you go and when is a feature for Find My, what you buy and when is again, first point. What if I tell you that literally any physical supermarket will also have this data?
kasperset 3y ago
Their Freeform app is nowhere near good as Notability or OneNote. I doubt this journaling app will be too bad for other developers. May be it will create more interest in that category.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  (1) It's brand new. (2) Freeform isn't a substitute for either of your examples. Miro and Microsoft Whiteboard are good comparisons, except they target enterprise while Freeform and other Apple "office basics" apps target personal/education/small business use.
hysan 3y ago
Many years ago, I used to love using a journaling app called Heyday. That was until the creator closed up shop without notice and suddenly every user lost all of their data. Even paying ones.[1] There was no way for users to export their data either. I tried building an app to match that functionality + add a lot of the features that are mentioned in the article in Apple’s offering. However, it wasn’t possible due to a lot of the restrictions in iOS. Seeing Apple implement this has me torn between a feeling of unfairness and excitement. Like why wasn’t I allowed to do this myself? But now that it’s here, do I use it? It has everything I wanted and it’s highly unlikely for Apple to shut down the app and burn their users. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinion.com/2016/05/09/heyday-photo-app-review/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinio...
DantesKite 3y ago
I wonder if they’ll use this to train large language models.
solarkraft 3y ago
> This kind of integration with other pre-installed apps and user data will set the app apart from other journaling options on the iPhone, potentially making it difficult for them to compete. I guess we need a Digital Markets Act 2 because I thought that's the type of stuff it was supposed to mitigate. This type of thing gets me endlessly pissed off at Apple. Guess how difficult and bug-ridden it is to synchronize files without iCloud (at least it's possible at all!).
ulfw 3y ago
Apple is the new Google. So many good apps they've started and either killed (Aperture) or basically abandoned (their office suite). Instead they're coming out with plenty of what's basically demo apps barely anyone uses. Freeform anyone? I guess it's much harder to compete with companies you are dependent on for your platform (Adobe and Microsoft) than with small developers of small tools.
- danhau 3y ago
  Freeform is their attempt to boost iPad and Apple Pen Sales. For what it does, it’s decent. With office suite I guess you mean Pages, Numbers, etc? How have those been abandoned? What are you missing?
rchaud 3y ago
> "It will make recommendations to users about what they might journal about that, including when the app detects behavior that is outside of the normal routine." Apple Notes introduces neural-engine powered "Clippy"? If this replaces the standard Notes app I'll wager there'll be a lot of backlash. People like Notes because it's the equivalent of Notepad on Windows - fast and un-fussy, your classic 'dumb' app.
robotburrito 3y ago
As far as journaling I like to use Obsidian. It provides me with a lot of flexibility with the data.
desro 3y ago
After reading through all the comments, I'm surprised that no one has looked at this from a Siri-centric perspective [except for the comment about Clippy ;)]. To me this looks like laying the groundwork for centralizing the most relevant and important information about yourself, which so crucially includes the contexts you are in! and are so often painstaking to actually record in detail when journalling manually. For what purpose? I genuinely think this leads to a Siri that's finally useful in a way that leapfrogs everything and everyone else out there. Think GPT-4(+) with an insane amount of detail and context tailored to you, and (hopefully!) executed in a way that re-affirms Apple's stated commitment to privacy and security. I have only the most cursory understanding of ML technology but have obviously been trying to follow along with everything pretty much since DALLE-2 made such a splash. With some of the impressive performance shown in smaller models, sometimes with different quantization, I think that Apple Neural Engine silicon might be getting more attention soon... okay, "soon" is probably over-optimistic. But – in September '22 I asked online about running Stable Diffusion[0] on M1 chips on iPad, since I was able to run it on an M1 Mac Mini. The 8-ball said "outlook not so good," and yet by November 8th liuliu had it running on _iPhone_[1]. These are truly interesting times. [0] I know this is not a 1:1 comparison. But Llama ran on my MacBook without any CoreML optimization. Maybe there will be a tier of requests that could be handled by a smaller model on-device, and more complex stuff heads to the datacenter. I am an amateur at best; don't listen to me. [1] https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-model-that-can-draw-everything-in-your-pocket/ https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-mo...
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Llama-scale models should have no problem running on iPhone. I doubt it will be a unique feature, though - not only is the Neural Engine near-useless for inferencing, Android devices have a much better runtime for loading and managing large models. Comparing Apple's Pytorch contributions to what Microsoft is doing on ARM with ONNX, it (ironically) feels like non-Apple platforms are teed-up better for local AI. Running LLaMA on an Ampere server or Rockchip SOC is easy as pie. If Apple does go this route, I feel like they're setting themselves up for disruption. Someone else (hell, maybe even Meta) will do it better, and Apple's implementation will hold on by the thread of native integration it uses. It's not a bad or new situation, but I'm going to bet that Apple will hamstring themselves by locking competitors out. Especially if the current pace of model development keeps up.
lycopodiopsida 3y ago
The elephant in the room here is maybe DayOne (disclaimer: I am a paying customer since 10 years, no other affiliation). I think that a real competition is actually good for them - they were very slow at adding features and fixing grave bugs, such as broken cli, broken and uncofigurable text export and btw, where are the promised shared journals? But I also fear that Apple’s own solution will have no proper export at all, similar to Notes and Reminders.

101 points by isaacdl 3y ago

xwdv 3y ago

Bad news for devs but good news for users and their mental health. Many people who didn’t even know about the benefits of journaling will now have a new app on their phone to help introduce it to them.

heavyset_go 3y ago

> It could monitor users' activities through the day in ways other apps can't. Nice, so even if users wanted to benefit from competition between Apple's and others' services, they can't because Apple blesses their software on iOS in ways that others' aren't.

mrzimmerman 3y ago
That’s definitely true but I don’t think it’s that simple. I love some of the apps that are iOS native and how their preferential treatment makes everything work with security I trust. BUT, I still prefer Google Maps, non-Safari browsers, Spotify over Apple Music, Feedly/my browser over Apple News. I agree that it’s problematic that apps made by the OS developer receive preferential treatment, but I haven’t personally found that to mean that the experience is better than third party apps.
judge2020 3y ago
If you bless some app with private permissions that allow it to do what Apple's competing app can do wrt whole-OS tracking, you now need a contract, some level of source code access, and a lot of time dedicated to reviewing what goes into that software to ensure the company isn't beaming it (even accidentally) to a third-party like FB via the FB SDK, and then Apple needs to make the decision "do we allow them to store this in their servers, or do we force them to do it on-device?". In every situation, it makes more sense to segment and triage private APIs for a promotion to a public API with user-friendly permission prompts and controls to protect the user's data.
- josephd79 3y ago
  Why? They don’t review every app you install on your MacBook.
TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
When 3rd party App Stores comes, people will reverse engineer those features and creates applications which can do exactly same thing.
- kaba0 3y ago
  That’s not how sandboxes work.

suddenexample 3y ago

On the topic of Apple building an uneven playing field that disadvantages third party apps - I want an iPhone but don't want to use Apple's services, so I'm sticking with Android for now. It just seems difficult to have an iPhone without suffering from Apple's handicapping of superior third party experiences. This is in contrast to Macs, which are absolutely top-notch pieces of hardware that would like you to use Apple services, but don't shove them down your throat.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
iPhone is worse in that way than macOS . You can pretty much use macOS as a Unix-like
hedora 3y ago
After trying a degoogled android device, I switched back to iOS. If you decide to keep things like location on device and disable ad telemetry on both platforms, you’ll find the third party iOS ecosystem is much stronger. (On Android, this leads to random apps closing at start with NullPointerException when they request unnecessary Google services.) I’d prefer a FOSS phone ecosystem, but sometimes pragmatism wins out.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  I would switch to an iPhone if I could get NewPipe, Firefox, and root-level ad blocking. Those are the killer features that make me keep my degoogled Android phone, despite the horrendous quality of most Android apps.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  In my experience the apps bundled with AOSP-based Android distributions aren't all that great either. Technically functional but most people are going to want Google versions instead.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
An iPhone without iCloud is so much better than an Android phone without a Google account.

npunt 3y ago

I'm actually quite excited by this, or at least the potential of this. The first and most exciting part of this is the ability to have a 'day in the life' consolidated ledger of our activities on device, across all app experiences. The ability to log our lives and add our own thoughts on top of it is important for self-reflection and for the many moments we want to recall using temporal cues and in context (I remember I was talking to Joseph and then saw a really cool webpage). A lot of the time the act of journaling is writing about the activity that has transpired on/through our devices (who we spoke with, what we did, etc), yet currently there is no affordance to link these together. We may add a note in a calendar event to remind ourselves of what happened, or rely on our memory, but just to look back at our day we have to cobble together a mix of calendar, notes, messages, etc; it's all a very disjointed experience. A consolidated journal/ledger of the day with the ability to write atop it is essentially the user-facing version of what a future AI assistant would see and present to users. A good assistant would not just do tasks but solicit our feelings and attune to us, which is essentially 'journaling' when brought into UI form. This whole product is frankly quite a bit overdue. The second value-add of this idea is tying journaling closer to Health. Health journaling is essential to managing chronic conditions, as its value is primarily retrospective discovery of trends. There's a lot of sub-par health journaling solutions out there, and none do a good job weaving themselves into the context of Health data. I hope to see this use case in this initiative. The history of our usage of devices has always remained a largely unexplored area of computing, and one of the major divergences between how people see the world and how computers present the world to us. Bringing history back to us in human-consumable form is important to get this sense back. The only other initiative that I see taking on this need is rewind.ai, which is quite exciting and I'm guessing is on Apple's short list of potential acquisitions. Finally this seems like the next step in the feature trajectory of adding context to our device usage. The first feature in this trajectory was Apple's Shared with You framework [1], which is about adding contextual data tags to activity (E.g. seeing a webpage in Safari showing at the top that it's shared by your friend Joseph, which reminds you of why its relevant). (FWIW I've spent the last year designing an OS for a new tablet platform with journaling as a central experience) [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou

3y ago

paxys 3y ago

> The app will be pre-installed on all iPhones that run iOS 17, and it will deeply integrate with location services, contacts, and more on the user's phone. > It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends. Basically a big FU to all the independent devs trying to compete on a fair playing field.

mertd 3y ago
Remember when it was a very big deal when a certain company pre installed a certain app in their OS?
- ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
  Is this a Microsoft Internet Explorer reference?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - judge2020 3y ago
    I'm not sure why it's a "remember when". Every android phone you could buy at Best Buy today will have preinstalled, unremovable apps.
  - josephd79 3y ago
    That’s what i thought.
- gcheong 3y ago
  Yes and this should be too as should Amazon be barred from making and selling its own products based on data collected through its marketplace.
  - josephd79 3y ago
    I agree. F that shit.

programmarchy 3y ago

It seems like Apple is trying to build a “healthy” social media platform (perhaps social experience is a better term). I could see them pulling this off pretty well, and would love if this took away oxygen from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the toxic systems out there.

smegger001 3y ago

on one hand that sucks for now competing developers of journaling apps. on the other any time a OS developer builds a new first party app they will be competing with other developers does that men they shouldn't make any other apps or improve the os in a way the another developer as app that fixes? no of course not. the question is how to balance it. My 'if i were god-emperor for a day' answer is to not give first party apps any access to restricted api or any preferential access to restricted permissions/data

_8j50 3y ago

Why can't I have iOS but without all the loss of control and privacy. For $1k/device can't someone establish a healthy competitor to iPhones that isn't low quality like android? The crappy deal these days is you can't have a phone that only calls and texts period. Forget UI and all that. 4G modem and an OS that displays UI for calling and texting with formally verified E2E encryption for both with no plans to offer any features outside of this period! I would buy that in a heartbeat.

brookst 3y ago
Sounds like you've identified a market need. Looking forward to what you make!
foogazi 3y ago
> I would buy that in a heartbeat. You and not many other people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- _8j50 3y ago
  Criminals and anyone wanting a guarantee of security(politicians, lawyers, journalists,etc...). It would be an alternative to signal, because unlike apps it would guarantee your device will not be compromised. The entire OS is call and text. Period.
robjan 3y ago
Isn't that what Pixel devices are supposed to be?

andrewjl 3y ago

Is this the whole story? Seems really at odds with Apple's strategy for Device Activity[1], available only as a first-party feature at first but in iOS 14 also becoming available as an API to third party apps. I see a parallel between a journaling app and HealthKit[2], where the latter is like basically a health and exercise journal for things like step counts[3] and medications[4]. It could follow a similar trajectory and eventually be made available as an API to third-party apps. [1](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity) [2](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit) [3](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquantitytypeidentifier/1615548-stepcount https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquanti...) [4](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinicaltypeidentifier/2976211-medicationrecord https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinic...)

fsflyer 3y ago

I'm hoping it's targeted towards folks that have intermittent issues. HealthKit has fields defined to store some information about various physical and mental symptoms and also nutrition, but there isn't a good way to populate the fields in iOS 16 and earlier. Some of the fields have been around since iOS 8, but Apple has regularly added to the list through iOS 16. Even if the app doesn't do any correlation, it will be very helpful to have the data collected into HealthKit so your health care provider has good data to work with.

daydream 3y ago
FoodNoms is an excellent food tracking app that populates nutrition information in HealthKit. It’s also an excellent iOS-native app. (No connection other than being a very happy customer.)
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  Gave it a try, since I've been looking for such a thing to replace my pen & paper solution. Unfortunately, it seems somehow broken. When I tried adding a meal, it just failed silently.

asjldkfin 3y ago

This is good news. For those who don't know, journalling apps universally suck. Especially when it comes to security. Day One, the canonically recommended app, doesn't even locally encrypt their entries, so basically anybody can access it despite the veneer of a password on the app.

syrrim 3y ago
Apple has full disk encryption across all their devices, no?

martin_drapeau 3y ago

Journaling is a good way to accumulate training data for the AI to understand the behavior of the device owner. I suppose that is the purpose.

Animats 3y ago

All that tracking data will be sent back to the mothership. First, Apple will deny that there's data collection. Then they will say they're keeping the data private. Then they will say it's being only being used for "anonymous tracking". Then it will come out it's being sold for marketing purposes. "It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends." That could be really useful for tracking down illegal immigrants, gays, and politicians meeting with lobbyists.

andrewbarba 3y ago
It will, most definitely, be end to end encrypted along with the rest of user data in the iCloud ecosystem.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Unless you live in China*. * https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351
- handsclean 3y ago
  iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted: name, home address, work address, who you talk to and when, where you go and when, what you buy and when… iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted unless you find and change multiple different settings that few people know about: files, photos, notes, texts, full copies of laptop’s and phone’s storage… I’d take a bet that 99% of the time Apple or a local regime wants to read iCloud user data, they can.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I’m almost sure that billing informations are required by law in plenty jurisdictions to be stored, where you go and when is a feature for Find My, what you buy and when is again, first point. What if I tell you that literally any physical supermarket will also have this data?

kasperset 3y ago

Their Freeform app is nowhere near good as Notability or OneNote. I doubt this journaling app will be too bad for other developers. May be it will create more interest in that category.

CharlesW 3y ago
(1) It's brand new. (2) Freeform isn't a substitute for either of your examples. Miro and Microsoft Whiteboard are good comparisons, except they target enterprise while Freeform and other Apple "office basics" apps target personal/education/small business use.

hysan 3y ago

Many years ago, I used to love using a journaling app called Heyday. That was until the creator closed up shop without notice and suddenly every user lost all of their data. Even paying ones.[1] There was no way for users to export their data either. I tried building an app to match that functionality + add a lot of the features that are mentioned in the article in Apple’s offering. However, it wasn’t possible due to a lot of the restrictions in iOS. Seeing Apple implement this has me torn between a feeling of unfairness and excitement. Like why wasn’t I allowed to do this myself? But now that it’s here, do I use it? It has everything I wanted and it’s highly unlikely for Apple to shut down the app and burn their users. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinion.com/2016/05/09/heyday-photo-app-review/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinio...

DantesKite 3y ago

I wonder if they’ll use this to train large language models.

solarkraft 3y ago

> This kind of integration with other pre-installed apps and user data will set the app apart from other journaling options on the iPhone, potentially making it difficult for them to compete. I guess we need a Digital Markets Act 2 because I thought that's the type of stuff it was supposed to mitigate. This type of thing gets me endlessly pissed off at Apple. Guess how difficult and bug-ridden it is to synchronize files without iCloud (at least it's possible at all!).

ulfw 3y ago

Apple is the new Google. So many good apps they've started and either killed (Aperture) or basically abandoned (their office suite). Instead they're coming out with plenty of what's basically demo apps barely anyone uses. Freeform anyone? I guess it's much harder to compete with companies you are dependent on for your platform (Adobe and Microsoft) than with small developers of small tools.

danhau 3y ago
Freeform is their attempt to boost iPad and Apple Pen Sales. For what it does, it’s decent. With office suite I guess you mean Pages, Numbers, etc? How have those been abandoned? What are you missing?

rchaud 3y ago

> "It will make recommendations to users about what they might journal about that, including when the app detects behavior that is outside of the normal routine." Apple Notes introduces neural-engine powered "Clippy"? If this replaces the standard Notes app I'll wager there'll be a lot of backlash. People like Notes because it's the equivalent of Notepad on Windows - fast and un-fussy, your classic 'dumb' app.

robotburrito 3y ago

As far as journaling I like to use Obsidian. It provides me with a lot of flexibility with the data.

desro 3y ago

After reading through all the comments, I'm surprised that no one has looked at this from a Siri-centric perspective [except for the comment about Clippy ;)]. To me this looks like laying the groundwork for centralizing the most relevant and important information about yourself, which so crucially includes the contexts you are in! and are so often painstaking to actually record in detail when journalling manually. For what purpose? I genuinely think this leads to a Siri that's finally useful in a way that leapfrogs everything and everyone else out there. Think GPT-4(+) with an insane amount of detail and context tailored to you, and (hopefully!) executed in a way that re-affirms Apple's stated commitment to privacy and security. I have only the most cursory understanding of ML technology but have obviously been trying to follow along with everything pretty much since DALLE-2 made such a splash. With some of the impressive performance shown in smaller models, sometimes with different quantization, I think that Apple Neural Engine silicon might be getting more attention soon... okay, "soon" is probably over-optimistic. But – in September '22 I asked online about running Stable Diffusion[0] on M1 chips on iPad, since I was able to run it on an M1 Mac Mini. The 8-ball said "outlook not so good," and yet by November 8th liuliu had it running on _iPhone_[1]. These are truly interesting times. [0] I know this is not a 1:1 comparison. But Llama ran on my MacBook without any CoreML optimization. Maybe there will be a tier of requests that could be handled by a smaller model on-device, and more complex stuff heads to the datacenter. I am an amateur at best; don't listen to me. [1] https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-model-that-can-draw-everything-in-your-pocket/ https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-mo...

smoldesu 3y ago
Llama-scale models should have no problem running on iPhone. I doubt it will be a unique feature, though - not only is the Neural Engine near-useless for inferencing, Android devices have a much better runtime for loading and managing large models. Comparing Apple's Pytorch contributions to what Microsoft is doing on ARM with ONNX, it (ironically) feels like non-Apple platforms are teed-up better for local AI. Running LLaMA on an Ampere server or Rockchip SOC is easy as pie. If Apple does go this route, I feel like they're setting themselves up for disruption. Someone else (hell, maybe even Meta) will do it better, and Apple's implementation will hold on by the thread of native integration it uses. It's not a bad or new situation, but I'm going to bet that Apple will hamstring themselves by locking competitors out. Especially if the current pace of model development keeps up.

lycopodiopsida 3y ago

The elephant in the room here is maybe DayOne (disclaimer: I am a paying customer since 10 years, no other affiliation). I think that a real competition is actually good for them - they were very slow at adding features and fixing grave bugs, such as broken cli, broken and uncofigurable text export and btw, where are the promised shared journals? But I also fear that Apple’s own solution will have no proper export at all, similar to Notes and Reminders.