Day One Is Popular for a Reason

The journaling app, Day One by Bloom Built Software, a subsidiary of Automattic, has been downloaded 15 million times and it has 200,000 five-star reviews. It is a consistent design award winner. I've been using it for 10 years; I have five journals and nearly 18,000 entries. 

My journals are:

• Exercise - auto entries from the calendar created by my exercise app
• Gratitude - manual entries of three bullet points a day
• News - auto entries created by tagged read-it-later articles
• Eating Out - manual entries
• Journal - a mix of manual and automated entries from many different sources

My automated entries (via IFTTT) include:

• Daily weather report
• TV shows and movies watched
• My Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon posts
• The RSS feeds from my different blogs

I use a Keyboard Maestro macro to copy a Markdown version of my daily note from Obsidian into Day One each night. All of the formatting transfers over. I feel confident in the privacy of my entries based on Day One's end to end encryption. The introduction of Apple's Journaling App did nothing but add to the functionality of Day One, as it now has the same prompting features.

I routinely add photos of my grandchildren texted to me by my kids using the share sheet on the iOS version. I have nearly 20,000 saved locations in my history and it's easy to create a backdated entry from one of them. I have several templates ranging from restaurant meals, to daily reviews. I have exported PDF yearly journals that I've created through the Day One export feature. Although I've never purchased a printer journal, they are very popular.

Day One is FREE to use forever with unlimited entries. Additional features, including unlimited photos, videos, and sync are available with a Day One Premium membership. A yearly subscription to Day One is $35. It's a universal app with availability on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. I've never lost any data.

One of my favorite features is "On This Day", a look back at what I was doing on this date in years past. It gets better every year as I increase the number of entries I have recorded in the app.