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Apple will launch a journaling app (arstechnica.com)
101 points by isaacdl on April 22, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 150 comments



> 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.


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.


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-...


I admit I skimmed the article and I think the concrete change apple did was this right:

> Apple Business Connect lets businesses create and update their information in the cards that represent them in apps and services that only Apple controls, like Apple Maps, Wallet, Messages, and in search results via Siri or Spotlight. Updates business owners make to their cards will then propagate to all these places. That incredible access to the right place at the right time for 1.8 billion active Apple devices has never been available before.

It seems to me that the rest of the article is just a kind of prediction about what Apple could do. Underline _could_ and that is different than doing or wanting.


But still, Apple’s ads are only in the News app and in paid placements in their App stores. It’s not like they have a widespread add platform like Google and Amazon.


> 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...


I mean - why not both? Their products have been on a hot streak recently - idk what other big tech company compares in terms of the quality of the core products they sell. And they've also been making a ton of money. That hasn't exactly gotten in the way of accomplishments like apple silicon and the apple watch


Apple still makes great products.


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.


Buy another phone.

That sounds incredibly glib, but a lot of Apple users feel this way. It's fine and I don't give a shit how the iPhone works by default because it works for me. It sounds like you're not the target market - go get an android and be happy.

The iPhone works the way it does, and if that's a pain for you, don't use a fucking iPhone. Imagine people who love driving stick pitching a fucking bitch fit because you can't install a clutch on the automatic car you bought. Not everything in life works or will ever work exactly the way you like.


Wrong analogy. Imagine people who love driving must always be forced to use exactly one tyre enforced by the manufacturer - despite other tyres being objectively better for their situation.

Not everything in life requires you to kneel and vigorously lick the boots of a corporate overlord.


> Imagine people who love driving must always be forced to use exactly one tyre enforced by the manufacturer

Actually that is exactly what happens.

Ok, maybe not one tyre, but a small number.

The car manufacturers all certify their vehicles against a small set of tyres. That's a fact.

Its a necessity because choice of tyres touches almost every part of the certification process ranging from fuel economy figures to NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness) specs and parameters and many many other things.

Look inside your fuel-cap flap, you'll typically find a label there showing you a list of tyre specifications, of which maybe only one or two are actually certified by the manufacturer for your exact car model. The should of course also normally be found in the owners manual too.

In addition, the higher up the car spectrum you go, the tighter the definitions become. For example, the likes of Porsche actually do name precise brand and model for tyres.

Sure you can go off-piste with your tyre selection. But the manufacturer will likely take great delight at voiding your warranty. And your insurance might have a thing or two to say too since you are going against manufacturers guidelines. Finally of course the on-board computer calibration will be all off too.


I only come into these threads to read the hissy fits. They always remind me of long time Windows users forced to use a Mac at work and moaning that they can't skin the Finder.


That’s hardly an option — which other device has similarly good hardware and that good privacy?

The only possibility would be a GrapheneOS-installed pixel, but the pixel is nowhere near an iphone in terms of hardware and besides all the unacceptable hardware bugs, google simply doesn’t seem to want to sell it to people. (Most of the EU is not a target for some insane reason).

The real solution is government intervention, which will allow sideloading.


Side loading may mean the 99% of people who don't care about privacy will have their preferences indulged, and if side loading becomes the norm then all of a sudden you'll find yourself being asked by your e.g. government or major airline to side load their app because they're tired of dealing with Apple's app store rules.


That's just baseless fear-mongering -- how many government apps do you have to sideload on Android? Apple doesn't have to make it accessible to grandmas, it can be shoved a few layers deep in settings so that they can never accidentally enable it, so in effect it doesn't cause any problem for that "99% of people", only benefiting the remaining 1%, so everyone can be happy (especially that the percentages are not as extreme, it would benefit much more people)


Play store rules are much more relaxed than Apple's app store rules though.

Also, not fear mongering, just speculating -- I look forward to this happening actually! Will finally be able to get an iphone and use software that isn't kneecapped by Apple's gatekeeping.


> you'll find yourself being asked by your e.g. government or major airline to side load their app because they're tired of dealing with Apple's app store rules

When you are a government, Apple will sides against you anyways, as seen as in China.


What “government” app do you install?


The market isn't working. There is no alternative.


But it's very infuriating because the iPhone does some things so right that nobody can replicate. The quality of the hardware, an actual small screen option (the iPhone 13 mini is the perfect size), magsafe is neat, etc. If I could put Android on my 13 mini I would but I have to live with iOS's issues because I like the hardware so much.


The 13 mini is too small.


It’s still too large and too heavy, I’d prefer the 5 size and weight.


I would say it's just a tad too small. My Pixel 5 was the perfect size but I'd take too small and able to reach all corners to too big and having to do finger gymnastics to use my device.


That's exactly what I've done personaly, I've bought an Android so that everything works again for me. I also decommissioned my iOS app and consider their platform fully legacy. Any bug on safari mobile will also be marked as a wontfix, users can get an Android phone in the future.


Fortunately this is changing with iOS 17. New EU laws mandate opening up the ecosystem.


The Nextcloud app is quite good, given the constraints.


Do you know the app PhotoSync ?


I couldn’t get it to work.

So I made the next most obvious choice - a vm which is logged into iCloud and downloads them, then rsyncs out the vm and onto a Synology file share.

It’s terrible.


Amazon photos app can just backup photos from ios. Take a look at their background upload.


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.


Is it fair to say that these people can buy a different product? Otherwise it sounds like you want iOS, and want Apple to put in the effort to make a product for you regardless of how that affects their margins, scope, public image, security, etc. If enough people are on your side, Apple will sell fewer iPhones, and the competitor that has these desired features will come out on top.


"You can't complain about anything a company does because the free market will take care of it" is a very tired argument, and basically never true. Free market economics disproportionately helps large corporations over the end consumer.

And specifically in the smartphone market, Google is always close behind in following the precedent set by Apple in implementing software restrictions. How does one protest then?


>How does one protest then?

Android is open source. You don't have to be a large player to make a phone with a custom OS. The hardest part will not having access to Google's Play ecosystem if you modify the OS too much.


Competition only works in well-defined markets. There is basically no competition in the mobile OS department, as it’s a winner(s) takes it all category, not even Microsoft could enter it, and not for lack of money/trying. 2 is a magic number, it is simply not gonna happen that devs will develop for more than 2 platforms.

So yes, I want ios to put in the effort and I want to force them by the government. I don’t see how is it bad, should I feel bad for a private entity for benefitting a huge number of its customers?


This assumes that 100% of iPhone and iPad customers understand the totality of the consequences of buying Apple's hardware.

Most people do not understand the intricacies of the iOS and App Store app distribution model, and most people do not buy Apple hardware because of it.

All users, including those users, deserve the freedom to own the hardware they buy and run what they want on it.


Do most of the android users / Windows users / Cloud users / Linux users understand the totality of consequences of their choices? I highly doubt that.

It may come as surprise but to lot of people/institutions getting something done is far more valuable than totally owning something.


> Do most of the android users / Windows users / Cloud users / Linux users understand the totality of consequences of their choices? I highly doubt that.

No, and I never suggested they did.

> It may come as surprise but to lot of people/institutions getting something done is far more valuable than totally owning something.

Doing what you want with the stuff you bought is not orthogonal to "getting something done".


I agree all users should be able to own the hardware and do what you want to it but most people do not care. They’ve been conditioned.


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.


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


I keep hearing this, yet I've never seen an ad on my iPhone.


The day I see one the day I’m done with Apple. So I hope I don’t.


Apple has ads in their News app, though not nearly as many as most new sites do.

They have paid placements in the App Store.

I suppose you could consider some of the music in the Music app to be promotional for that music.

It’s nothing like Google’s ad network.


1. Red Badge in settings when iPhone is not backed up (you will need a premium subscription because there is a 99% chance your backup will be bigger than 5 GB)

2. Red Badge in settings when your device is eligible for Apple Care+

3. Bullet point for 1 year free AppleTV at the top of the settings app

4. Same as 3) but for Apple Arcade

I had a bug where the AppleTV ad was shown consistently for two years, although I already used the trial. It only got fixed with the latest iOS update.


The App Store is riddled with ads; the Music App is a giant ad for their music streaming service; there are ads in the Settings app!¹ Maps will reportedly get them too.²

I too have mostly escaped ads on iOS, but I think that’s a combination of not living in the US, never opening the App Store, and a few other factors. I’m under no illusion that will last forever. Tim Cook must be salivating with ideas.

¹ https://daringfireball.net/2023/04/ios_adware

² https://www.macrumors.com/2022/08/21/ads-coming-to-apple-map...


Where have you seen ads in the settings app? I must be immune to this stuff. I do not notice ads period.


> Where have you seen ads in the settings app?

It’s explicitly linked in my post. In the article they talk about it and have a link to a screenshot. Search for:

> I’ve noticed an ad in Settings on my iPhone, in the iCloud section at the very top of the first screen


Someone was saying that in the Storage section of Settings, when you run low on storage, there is a prompt to enable iCloud storage and offload some content to the cloud. They are calling that an Ad.


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...


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.)


If the big company is the owner of the platform, it can preinstall it on your device, so it is not a fair competition.


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


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.


I agree. F that shit.


Is this a Microsoft Internet Explorer reference?


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.


That’s what i thought.


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


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.


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.


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.


> 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...



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)


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


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...


> 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.


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.


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.


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


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


That’s not how sandboxes work.


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.


>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?



"Now that we’ve established that Apple collects and uses your data to serve ads, does it sell your data too? Turns out the answer is No, Apple doesn’t sell your data to third-party advertisers."

Thanks for providing your own refutations. Now stop lying.


A lot of people seem to define “selling your data” to mean “selling ads that are measured with your data”. If it’s “selling your data” when FB does that, the same is true when it’s Apple.


If you can run an ad aimed at a specific group via Apple, as the advertiser you can track who gets the ad and thus track who is in that group. It's inherent in ad tracking.


Google doesn't sell your data, either, and neither does Facebook. That's a technicality that doesn't mean much.


The whole privacy thing started because of FB selling user data to Cambridge Analytica and it getting leaked.


They didn't sell any data to Cambridge Analytica. CA just ran apps (quizzes) on Facebook at a time where such apps would be given too many permissions by default. In particular they'd have access to the user's friend list. Much like apps on iPhones back in the day.


Ah I see. So the data that FB collected was leaked to 3rd parties because of the systems they put in place exposed it. That's not much better.

The end result was the same, and it let to a wave of privacy resulting in Apple locking down their app permissions further, and FB throwing a fit about it.


I think it let everyone to really lock down their APIs. I used to meet startup founders who unironically told me their monetization plan was to mine users contacts and other information and sell it on. "Everybody's doing it" they'd tell me.

I think people are only annoyed at Apple because they use that same locked down information for their own services, including their ad network. Though of course Facebook does that too.


>They didn't sell any data to Cambridge Analytica

It is somewhat strange to sell how HN has shifted again. Somewhere along 2022, most of the extreme left, also the Anti Facebook, Anti Ads, group are gone or disappeared.

You can now actually say They didn't sell any data to Cambridge Analytica.


Facebook profited handsomely from the truly fucked up ad targeting they offered CA, quite literally segmenting populations based on things like personality, political beliefs, traits that define protected classes, racist/antisemetic/etc beliefs, whether they were friends with people who were/had either of those things, if they were mentally ill, etc. Their API also exposed their users' private data, including things like location, likes, follows, comments, friends, their posts, etc.

Facebook's API allowed CA to harvest a lot of data, which allowed them to conduct psychological profiling and targeting research, and analysis on massive troves of FB's data. All of that allowed them to develop tailored ads for specific segments of the population they chose to turn elections. Based on the profiling they did, for example, they were able to determine that if they were able to show 1,000 narrowly chosen people in one neighborhood, say, racist ads, CA's statistics show that they will be able to turn a tight election. CA was able to do this because of the data Facebook provided them, as well as the advertising platform Facebook provides that allowed CA to pinpoint segments of the public that are susceptible to their particular brand of psychological and political exploitation.

However, the data that CA mined was provided by Facebook's API, and anyone with a free API key could have mined it. FB technically didn't sell them the data, but they certainly sold them the means to manipulate elections and violate the privacy of millions of people. And as I said, that's a technicality that doesn't mean much.


What? Not at all, from what I recall. When did it come out that FB sold the data to Cambridge Analytica? I thought they mostly abused/misused a "loophole"


Facebook's targeting, down to segmenting people who believe in the "white genocide conspiracy theory" into their own category[1], that allowed CA to laser pinpoint groups of people to show ads to[2], was a key part of the scandal, as was the fact that Facebook's API "leaked" information about users. I say "leaked", because it was the same kind of data a lot of APIs offered at the time and still do[3]. That data was offered for free to anyone with an API key.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/02/facebook-ads-white-supre...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambr...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...


None of them included anything that is not almost a technical requirement. The first one is especially biased against apple, it lists a bunch of basic things comparing apple and google showing how “they are the same”, but it’s only things like transactional information.. like how else do you even pay otherwise in the AppStore? Age is required for any Family feature.

Google is eons worse, but for some reason more interesting categories were not listed at all.


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


You’re not answering the question are you?


>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.


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


Unless you live in China*.

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


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.


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?


So when it’s Google doing this it’s evil, but when it’s Apple, it’s ok if it a feature uses it, or if some nation wanted it, or if somebody else did it too?

I do think that a lot of these are hard problems to truly tackle, I was just commenting on this cognitive dissonance where people say things like “iCloud user data is private”, while in fact iCloud user data is this huge trove of very personal information that’s not private, and we don’t act like those ideas are in conflict.

Besides, Apple’s not doing the most they can within the confines of user wishes and local law. Neither one requires using dark patterns to ensure that 95% of users have privacy turned off. They’re also tracking every interaction for ad purposes on the App Store. I’m not trying to call them an evil boogeyman, but I think they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too: have users buy more because they think it’s private, while not disadvantaging themselves or pissing off local regimes by actually preventing data access in the majority of cases.


That's kinda the problem. This "required by law" bit obviously conflicts with their "privacy is a human right" shtick. Just look through their transparency page[0], where Apple confirms that device and account data is turned over by the thousands annually. Despotic nations like China get 93% of device access requests granted. Apple doesn't even have control over Chinese iCloud servers, their allegiance to the government directly prevents them from protecting their users.

> What if I tell you that literally any physical supermarket will also have this data?

Great, now we're comparing iPhone privacy to a supermarket. Wasn't Apple supposed to care about this stuff?

[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/


We are talking about China, that straight up just replaced Google with their own thing.

You are either doing business with China at their own rules, or you don’t do anything. Apple has different iCloud settings for the rest of the world, and while it does suck for Chinese people, the alternative would be some domestic OS with much much more involved privacy violations.

Also, why should a company be above local law? Sure it sucks when the local law is bad and apple should not make the job easier, but if they do lawfully request some data then I don’t see why Apple should not fulfill it.


> or you don’t do anything.

This was the ethical abstention that the rest of FAANG pursued. At least, the ones who didn't have vested manufacturing contracts in the China mainland. Let them replace it with their own thing, it's a better alternative than compromising every iPhone "just in case". It's not only about domestic security, it's about how it devalues the meaning of Apple's privacy worldwide.

> Also, why should a company be above local law?

Because their principles of privacy and security supersede their interest in moneymaking? If the local law is unjust, you don't do business there. That's what Microsoft, Google, Netflix and

> I don’t see why Apple should not fulfill it.

Your phone shouldn't have a backdoor in the first place. Letting Apple have this much vertical authority over their platform is why we're here now, trying to decide if America's largest corporation is right for sleeping with the enemy. It's obviously wrong (as you note), but we're also helpless to resist it (as you also note). The best path of recourse is legislation that dilutes Apple's absolute authority and forces them to play ball with the industry. It's attractive to legislators, regulators, and the common people.


> it's a better alternative than compromising every iPhone "just in case"

But that’s absolutely not what happens - do you have any sort of citation for that?


How do you think Apple is granting device access to law enforcement?


> 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.


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


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.


(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.


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.


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.)


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.


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.


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...


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.


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...


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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


>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.


This is simply untrue, especially for Macs.


Have you actually used MacOS without perusing Apple's services? It's horrible, because MacOS is designed with the assumption the user has an Apple account.

It's not obnoxious like Windows 11's badgering for a Microsoft account, but it manifests in parts of MacOS (namely anything to do with the App Store) flat out refusing to work until an Apple account is provided.

I may have to make a throwaway Apple account just so I can do something as mundanely basic as updating the system applications.


> I may have to make a throwaway Apple account just so I can do something as mundanely basic as updating the system applications.

Perhaps you have an odd definition of "system applications", but macOS updates do not require logging into iCloud, or the use of an Apple ID.


System applications as in the programs that come pre-installed with a fresh install of MacOS.

Updating MacOS doesn't require an Apple account, but not the pre-installed stuff.


> System applications as in the programs that come pre-installed with a fresh install of MacOS.

This is misleading.

All apps included with macOS are updated via Software Update and don't require a login.

What I think you're referring to are apps you get free with the purchase of a new Mac. This includes the suites previously referred to as iLife and iWork.

These aren't part of macOS, and if you do a clean install they aren't there, but you do get a free copy, via the App Store, with the purchase of a new Mac. The App Store does indeed require a login.


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.


> 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!).


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.


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


> "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.


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


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.


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)_/¯


> 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.

This must be vehicle- or Audible-specific, because my complaint is exactly the opposite: My phone continues playing the last thing played, which is often not what I want.

For example: When connecting to my car in the morning, the iPhone continues playing my sleep noise instead of one of my preferred choices for that Bluetooth context — music or podcasts. It sort of astounds me that annoyances like this can persist for years.

EDIT: Whoa! I did some digging based on this conversation and, at some point, Apple added the ability to trigger an Automation in response to connecting to a specific Bluetooth device. Maybe this will help you too, @npunt?


Ooh thanks I'll take a look!


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


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.


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...)


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


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.


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.


> I would buy that in a heartbeat.

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


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.


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


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


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.


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?


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




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