Apple will launch a journaling app

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/apple-plans-mental-health-focused-journaling-app-for-ios-17/

by isaacdl • 3 years ago

101 150 3 years ago

xwdv• 3 years 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_go6• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

judge20203• 3 years 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.

josephd796• 3 years ago

Why? They don’t review every app you install on your MacBook.

TheLoafOfBread• 3 years ago

When 3rd party App Stores comes, people will reverse engineer those features and creates applications which can do exactly same thing.

kaba09• 3 years ago

That’s not how sandboxes work.

suddenexample• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

iPhone is worse in that way than macOS . You can pretty much use macOS as a Unix-like

hedora• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Dalewyn3• 3 years ago

I want an iPhone but don't want to use Apple's services

If you don't want Apple's services then neither iOS nor MacOS can satisfactorily work for you. Their products are built on the assumption that you will immerse or have immersed yourself completely in their ecosystem, trying to use one on its own is a horrible experience.

LeoPanthera4• 3 years ago

This is simply untrue, especially for Macs.

LeoPanthera4• 3 years ago

An iPhone without iCloud is so much better than an Android phone without a Google account.

npunt4• 3 years 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

martin_drapeau2• 3 years ago

I hope journaling can help Siri/iOS be much smarter. For instance, it should know the podcast app I am using and when I put in my AirPods and press/say Play, just play the last podcast I had open - not the music app which I never use. I shouldn't have to configure that. The OS should just know.

npunt4• 3 years ago

100%, somehow iOS/MacOS do exactly the wrong thing when it comes to handling audio streams. Two more:

1. when you turn on your car and it connects to iPhone via BT, it just starts playing what was last played in Apple Music, even if you were most recently listening to an Audible book and had paused it before.

2. Another is when you're playing music and then open a YouTube video. The pause button on the keyboard should pause the music (in the background) not the video (in the foreground), yet Apple insists on a simple foreground=control rule.

Apple OSes just have no mental model for what we want to be playing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

andrewjl2• 3 years ago

Do you see any overlap between something like Roam and this?

npunt4• 3 years ago

Not really. Roam is way out on a limb on its assumptions of how involved users want to be in the structuring of data, and is targeting the completely opposite audience to Apple: deep power users instead of maximal approachability.

If I were building a v1 of this iOS journal, I'd do the following:

1. Consolidated daily and weekly ledgers in a nice UI, basically a much fancier version of one of those generated Photos albums. Lets us scroll through to see our day with objects representing the activities across all the different apps we used.

2. Ability to attach a journal/note on anything in those ledgers, both individual objects (e.g. photos, a health reading, a convo in messages) and the overall day/week.

3. Reuse Notes' UX and formatting for these journals. No need to link between notes for v1, that's a power user feature.

4. Ability to attach journal entry from within individual app experiences like Health, Notes, Calendars, Photos, etc (possibly via Share Sheet, but perhaps more embedded), as well as link back to the main ledger when there are journals attached to those objects.

Honestly hearing that Apple is doing this makes me want to join them and work on this product. In my eyes, journaling needs to be an OS-level experience, because greater affordances for self-reflection are a core part of developing better executive function. Making reflection just another app competing against all the other apps and addictions and bullshit that our devices provide is a disservice to our sense of agency and self-determination; journaling and reflection need to sit atop these experiences.

paxys3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Remember when it was a very big deal when a certain company pre installed a certain app in their OS?

ScoobleDoodle• 3 years ago

Is this a Microsoft Internet Explorer reference?

gcheong• 3 years 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.

jasonjayr• 3 years ago

Remember when System 7 included a clock widget that killed a popular shareware version and did almost exactly the same things?

crooked-v• 3 years ago

On the other hand, the number of outside companies I trust to have access to all that data is exactly zero. Even Apple themselves are only trustworthy because their core business is selling expensive devices to the user, rather than selling the user to advertisers.

paxys3• 3 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of people who will be perfectly happy with an iPhone without an App Store or any third party apps, and there's nothing stopping them from using it in such a way today.

For others, it's important to have the ability to use their device in ways that aren't 100% controlled by a single company. It's about having a choice and having alternate options. Large platform providers going "we know what is good for you" has been a major setback for personal computing over the last decade or two, and it's sad that so many consumers are enthusiastically accepting it as the new norm.

benguild• 3 years ago

It’s definitely not zero. The data should just stay on device, which is currently a flaw of the data and privacy protections offered in most smartphone applications.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

And that is totally your right.

But the fact that today I still cannot use a different web-browser engine than the iOS one is appalling. I cannot change the Photos app for an app that offers native integration with my Synology. I am forced to go through iCloud.

thomasahle3• 3 years ago

Apple is doubling down pretty hard on advertising though. It made nearly 4 billion on ads last year, and in general services are now 25% of their total revenue. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddoty/2023/02/08/apple-the-...

rat9988• 3 years ago

You did fall for the brand and marketing trap though. Why would Apple make such an app? They are investing hard in advertising.

latexr3• 3 years ago

their core business is selling expensive devices to the user

Only until Tim Cook reverses that trend. “Services” revenue has been growing like crazy and will continue to do so as Apple pursues ever more aggressive strategies to shove ads in our faces.

Steve Jobs’ last mistake was appointing as CEO someone who cares about money this much over good products.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/02/apple-services-re...

deminature• 3 years ago

Being 'sherlocked' [1] is a time-honored tradition of 3rd party devs getting their lunch eaten by Apple. Anyone publishing an app knows they can be put out of business without notice if Apple likes your idea too much.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/all-the-things-apple-sherl...

joemi• 3 years ago

Isn’t this just how making a product (any product) works? If you’re a small company and you don’t have a patent over the general concept of your unique product, another larger company can swoop in and make the same thing and run you out of business. It’s pretty much why parents exist.

(Mind you I’m not a fan of general software patents, but that’s what’s needed if you don’t want this to happen to software.)

camillomiller• 3 years ago

In 15 years of tech reporting I’ve seen this over and over. And yet, no single independent software company has been driven out of business by Apple eating their lunch. There might have been pivots, but indie devs don’t go bust overnight because Apple makes something similar to what they do. Apple getting into a space means an order of magnitude jump for the space itself, with increased user interest and discovery of alternative apps as well. Nonetheless, this is a very easy narrative to present before the narrative and there will always be a colleague in a big newspaper who will write the same article again, with the same disgruntled indie dev crying wolf. So it goes.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

The overwhelming majority of customers do not know or care. Apple would be pretty foolish to worry about the wrong things. Users just want the best product and experience.

throw0101b• 3 years ago

Basically a big FU to all the independent devs trying to compete on a fair playing field.

"Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss" — The Who

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...

bookofjoe2• 3 years ago

Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss

https://www.google.com/search?q=who+lyrics+meet+the+new+boss...

rchaud2• 3 years ago

Frankly I don't think this really competes with stuff like Obsidian, Roam, Notion or Craft Notes. All of them have a certain amount of "power user lock-in" where they've developed personal workflows that wouldn't translate to another app easily.

willio58• 3 years ago

Journaling can mean many things. Twitter could be considered a journaling app.

At first I read the headline and thought this was dumb, but maybe it will be more like a simple social media app that’s less about mass news stories and more about people you care about (kinda like Facebook back in the OG days)

bookofjoe2• 3 years ago

Yes! I consider Twitter first and foremost a journaling app and have used it as such from the get-go, an online Commonplace Book.

programmarchy• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

badrabbit2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Sounds like you've identified a market need. Looking forward to what you make!

foogazi• 3 years ago

I would buy that in a heartbeat.

You and not many other people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

badrabbit2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Isn't that what Pixel devices are supposed to be?

fsflyer• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

andrewjl2• 3 years 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)

[2](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit)

[3](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquanti...)

[4](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinic...)

asjldkfin• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Apple has full disk encryption across all their devices, no?

martin_drapeau2• 3 years 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.

Animats3• 3 years 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.

ajdude• 3 years 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.

Do we have any records of Apple doing this previously?

Teever• 3 years ago

Its basically the MO of the entire tech industry since internet connectivity became ubiquitous.

Animats3• 3 years ago

Yes.[1][2][3]

[1] https://fossbytes.com/apple-data-collection-explained/

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-privacy-data-collection/

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/apple_data_collection...

andrewbarba• 3 years ago

It will, most definitely, be end to end encrypted along with the rest of user data in the iCloud ecosystem.

smoldesu5• 3 years ago

Unless you live in China*.

* https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

handsclean2• 3 years 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.

misssocrates• 3 years ago

Wouldn't it be useful for tracking down any human being?

tenpies• 3 years ago

Then it will come out it's being sold for marketing purposes

You forgot the last part: then we'll learn Apple has been granting near-automatic access to any three-letter agency that wants to read your journal.

ksec2• 3 years 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.

Well I dont disagree with most of the points, considering I was the first few on HN to rally about their so called privacy stand / fundamental human right, but

Then it will come out it's being sold for marketing purposes

I seriously seriously doubt. As much as I like to shit on Apple, I think the worst they do is to hold all the Data for themselves and build an Advertising platform. Unless that is what you mean by being sold for marketing purposes, which is what most of HN thinks during 2017 - 2022. And that is a generalisation of US / Free World only. They might very likely hand those Data to some government.

kasperset• 3 years 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.

CharlesW2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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://j9sopinio...

DantesKite• 3 years ago

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

solarkraft2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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?

rchaud2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

desro2• 3 years 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-mo...

smoldesu5• 3 years 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.

desro2• 3 years ago

If I had to place a wager I'd guess that it'll be pretty typical Apple: they won't be first, but the ironclad integration of their hardware and software will enable some unique stuff. I'm picturing what Microsoft recently demoed with Office 365 Co-Pilot [0] but billed more as for your entire life beyond work.

I have to think they wouldn't mobilize some of their capital reserves if need be in order to avoid missing this wave. Part of me thinks that's the only reasonable cause for Siri being so terribly useless for so long— that it's because they have a "leapfrog" up their sleeves. I acknowledge this is a pretty heavy cope though.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230420002004/https://blogs.mic...

lycopodiopsida• 3 years 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.

Apple will launch a journaling app

Related Stories