Apple has unveiled Journal, a new journaling app for iOS that allows iPhone users to regularly log their daily activities. Announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Journal is the company’s latest step into the health and wellness segment, joining other iOS apps like Fitness, Sleep, and Breathe that help users track and manage aspects of their everyday lives.
Journal will be released on iOS 17, which is expected to roll out in September later this year. Apple says that the new iPhone app will use on-device machine learning to curate personalized suggestions to inspire what users will write about, pulling information from messages, pictures, music, workouts, location data, and more. Journal is end-to-end encrypted, only storing information locally on the phone, and iPhone users can control what device data is used to generate these suggestions for additional privacy.
Journal is set to compete against third-party journaling apps like Day One, which initially launched for Mac and iOS in 2012 before expanding to include Android in 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported back in April that it had viewed documents detailing Apple’s plans for Journal — at that time codenamed “Jurassic” — noting similarities with existing journaling apps. “It’s always the worst thing to have to hear that you’re about to be Sherlocked,” said Day One founder Paul Mayne upon being notified about Jurassic by The Wall Street Journal.
“Sherlocking” is a two-decade-old reference to when Apple was accused of copying features from Watson, a third-party macOS search tool. The term has since become a nod toward Apple’s habit of releasing native services that appear to be closely inspired by products from third-party developers.
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