Journals Aren’t Forever
This Just In: After over 13 years, I’ve deleted the Day One journal app. Here’s what it helped me realize about software subscriptions.
Before I started a blog in college, I journaled in random Word documents. It was a form of digital note-taking and a way to process my thoughts. However, it was by no means organized or searchable — the files are now lost to the scrap pile of digital history.
In the summer of 2012, I heard about the Day One journal app. It promised to keep all of my thoughts and journal scraps in a single location, always accessible from my phone.
I signed up immediately and became user number 961, one of the first people to use the app. It was amazing until Automattic acquired it, and now it’s stagnant.
What was once the standard for journaling and note-taking apps, Day One no longer beckoned me. I used to want to answer the daily questions, which led to a 1,903-day writing streak.
But my habits changed, and so did my preferences. I no longer wanted (or trusted) housing my thousands of entries on Automattic’s servers. Sure, they were end-to-end encrypted, but they weren’t under my control. In the age of AI training, I don’t want some of my most sensitive writing anywhere that I haven’t explicitly given consent to.
So, after 13 years with the app, I archived the data and deleted my subscription. I’ve temporarily moved to Diarly and am also playing with Apple’s barebones Journal app.
All software is replaceable. Just because something was once great does not guarantee that it will always be so. I'll miss what Day One originally was, not what it became.
The choice on Day One has me exploring other software I use, but I am not overly thrilled with. Grammarly, for instance, is fantastic, but it requires sending everything I type to its servers for review (and likely AI training); I don’t want that. But I also can’t spell at all and without Grammarly, my writing would be much harder to read.
I had hoped that Apple’s Writing Tools would step up here, but they did not. Like most of Apple’s current-generation Apple Intelligence features, Writing Tools were a bit anti-climactic. Sure, they can replace Grammarly, but only when asked — it’s a glorified system-wide spellchecker on demand. I need something omnipresent to help me as I type in real time.
All of this is to say that writing tools and software do not last forever. They come and they go. Find something you’re happy with and use it until you’re no longer happy, then find something else. Loyalty to a software will only take you so far.
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