Apples Journal app is kind of smart and basic

The Apple Journal app is so simple that at first I felt like I was missing something. The entire app is just one page: a reverse timeline of your journal entries, with a big plus button at the bottom. I hit the plus sign, and a cover appeared with a few options: tap New Entry at the top, or respond to one of the magazine’s reflection prompts. What can you do to make someone else’s day better this week? One asks to write about a time when you found an unexpected solution to a difficult problem, the other reads.

When you’re creating a journal entry, you can add photos and videos, record an audio note, or record the location associated with your entry. When you look at the timeline, you can filter to only see entries with photos or awesome entries you’ve bookmarked, but that’s about it. You can also use this app to remind you every day. I don’t know what I really expected from a journaling app made by Apple, but this is just a journaling app, and a very basic one at that.

As far as I can tell, there are two reasons why the Journal app, which comes to iPhone users in iOS 17.2 and is currently in public beta, exists. The first is that health and wellness are important to Apple as a company, and there’s a lot of evidence that regular daily writing is somehow a good thing. The second is that in many ways, your phone is essentially the same Full A place to keep a diary, because it can do it for you.

The big idea behind Apple Journal is that your phone can learn to recognize what Apple calls Moments. It can look at where you’ve been, who you’ve FaceTimed with, how many videos you’ve taken, and other signals that only your phone has access to, and conclude that it’s probably something you want to remember and revisit. Your phone is the only device you both know you’ve been in touch with your boyfriend for an hour And Immediately after that you listened to the 11 tracks straight from the Confessional dashboard. He knows you hit a personal best in your marathon training today and finished the run with a sick view from the top of a mountain. With access to all this information, the journal could theoretically start collecting things and prompting you to not only add them to your personal timeline, but to take a moment to reflect on them. However, Apple is concerned about exactly how it all works and exactly what signals matter and how.

It’s a really cool idea, especially since Apple is making this technology, which Apple calls the Suggestions for Moments API, available to other third-party journaling apps. All the machine learning and processing happens on your device, and the app you’re using only gets information about Moments when you choose one to add. (The only part of the journal that isn’t completely local are iCloud backups, which are self-encrypted.)

I must also say that it is a complete minefield. Remember when Facebook’s feature on this day showed people horrible memories they’d rather not relive and revisit? The journal has access to more data and can do even worse. As my colleague Victoria Song wrote in June, if your camera roll is anything like mine, it’s a collection of happy, calm, angry, frivolous, mundane, and sad moments. Messed up because life is messy. And if the Journal app does take a page from Apple’s Memories feature, chances are it’ll ambush you with memories you don’t want or aren’t ready to see.

You have control over the data that the journal uses to suggest moments, and you can also turn them off completely if you prefer. But they’re all on/off switches, and it’s nice to see Apple offer more precise controls over time.

So far, I can’t vouch for how it works, because I’ve only been using the journal for a few days, and it hasn’t even once suggested that I add it. (And I was taking moody photos and listening to Taylor Swift the whole time!) But it will be fascinating to see how Apple handles the moment generation process and how and if other apps integrate the Suggestions API. Third-party apps can’t import their stuff directly into the Moments system, but data from any app that uses SiriKit, CallKit, or HealthKit can be fed into Suggestions. Again, the exact alchemy behind the moments remains somewhat of a mystery.

Another way to get things into a journal is through the iPhone Share tab. You can save links and media from the web or many other applications, and Journal saves a rich link to the source. Here the intention seems to be good (I can play the Spotify track right in my journal timeline), but the performance is off at points. (It doesn’t realize I’m subscribed and just starts the free preview.) Overall, the magazine definitely doesn’t replace your bookmarking app or next reading service, nor does it try to. The app is so focused on an easy place to create and review journal entries that it doesn’t even let you have tags or folders.

At least for now, I suspect Journal might be appealing as an entry-level journaling app, but it likely won’t convince many people to ditch their existing journals. (I’m a longtime Day 1 user, and nothing in the magazine makes me want to switch.) It’s perfectly true that your phone knows you, unlike the other devices you own, and Apple probably has a right to try to figure out how to improve performance. use yourself Life

But I think about all the times my Apple Watch screams at me to get up while I’m sick in bed, and I wonder how good my devices really are. do know me And I wonder how I feel about the idea that my phone even could Get it right Are we really just a collection of things we do on our screens, and is it our job to teach our devices to understand us better? Did the future of artificial intelligence look like that?

Sorry to put your whole being out there. It usually happens when I’m journaling a lot.