Day One Journal: Private Diary App Reviews

I use day one for everything—gratitude, productivity, fitness, and capturing special moments with my loved ones. I keep everything in one journal and organize my entries using tags. I love the complete view of my life this gives me when I look back through my timeline.

This is a great app for people who want some photos for their journal entries. Not only is it very easy to use, its also perfect for traveling and just recording your thoughts.

Bought this thinking I had scored. Used it for years and updated when the new design came out. Now I have to pay for what I already had? Looking for a new platform. I can see the desire to progress and make it better by funding the progress, but dont punish your loyal customers. Make the new freemium players pay and keep us where we were and give us what we paid for.

Review 2 (July 2017): This is a perfect example of an excellent application being plagued by unsuccessful updates and new feature roll outs. At great personal expense, I have now purchased both the mac application and the original option to become a day one plus member (which has since become second to the almighty "premium" membership status... an idea undoubtedly conjured up not by the day one development team but almost certainly by the folks interested in monetizing the app with little regard for how such changes would affect existing users). I can properly articulate my frustration with Day One for the improper handling of my premium (sorry, PLUS) status. At the time I purchased PLUS it was all there was. I took it one step further and paid for the mac app and have been unable to get these to sync despite having countless IT certifications and extensive training computer science and software development. Good bye day one. You failed me miserably on so many levels. Hello again, evernote. ____________________ Review 1: Internal server error when attempting to sync with mac app i paid $40. Tried via apple id and tried via day one login while on multiple networks (home and office) and while on 4g lte data connection. Not cool.

So grateful to have this journal with me at all times. This a a game changer, a lifesaver....Thank You!!!

Helps regulate my life! Journaling is so useful.

Ive loved this app from day one since its Classic transformation into the beautiful new version. The main reason I went pro was simply to have more journals. But you get so much more with upgrade! I do more than just writing Journal entries W/this app. Its so versatile that Ive used it for just about everything. I have tried at least 25-35 different apps over the years that are for journaling like this one and they all (except for 4) havent held up to my scrutiny. Ive never had any major problems and the few Ive had the devs responded to promptly. When the devs respect their customers and users they get great reviews and of course it makes me happy to say "HEY! Have I got a great app for you!" To everyone I meet (Yes Im spreading the love) ??

The only cant-live-without app

Ive been using Day One for about 5 years. Its great being able to grab the nearest device to write in my journal. It definitely has more features than I use, but for writing a daily journal with pictures that syncs across my Apple devices, its great.

Would be flawless if the curser wouldnt chase to the bottom of my page when its time to edit. One chase is one thing, but no, this thing fights me like a pit bull. I tap where I wish to edit, and off we go to the bottom, over and over again. Its an all-out battle. Aggravating as hell. As a diary, that has its place, but it would be great to have an update that includes a global command to "turn off chasing". This app is so much more than a journal, and that single feature would give me back so much of my time, as Im inside of this app multiple times a day, almost every day of the week.

Ive used Day One since 2013 but Im not in favor of this particular move to a subscription. The model itself makes sense, but $50 is way too much for a niche market like journaling. Even though I can get it at $25, thats still too much. Time to go.

In February 2015 I purchased Day One. It was a great app with iCloud synchronization, multiple journals, and lots of great features. Later, they added the ability to attach multiple photos to a single journal entry, something I had been needing for some time. Recently, they moved to a proprietary syncing system, which required upgrading to the "Pro" subscription, but I made do without using my iPad as well. Imagine my frustration while making an entry at work today only to discover that now they have disabled both multiple journals and attaching multiple photos to a single entry in the last app update unless I pay for a subscription service! What does this tell you about the developers of this software? That they do not value their customers and they cannot be trusted. I PAID for an app with certain functionality. Later additional functionality was added to the app I purchased... only to have much of that functionality later removed unless I buy into a subscription service. FORGET IT!!! I will NEVER do so, and neither should you. Other developers are creative. They develop new, more powerful, more effective software. You might have to purchase a new or upgraded app or subscribe to get NEW functionality, but most reputable developers dont slowly remove existing functionality from existing paying customers applications in an effort to extort more money from from them! Before you purchase a subscription to this app, ask yourself, "am I willing to lose the functionality I will come to rely upon when Bloom Built decides that their one and only app isnt bringing in as much money as theyd like?" Hey, Bloom Built, get creative... design a new app... come up with something new and compelling. Quit sticking it to your existing customers!

As long as you have the full version. Great!

This app is so frustrating. The reality is, theres literally no journaling app out there as good that offers as many options as DayOne. Its literally THE BEST journaling app. However, I have a hard time trusting that my journals are safe going forward. Is there anyway you can just put in a toggle for Markdown, rather than having this half-rear-ended application? Youve broken my 800 journals I imported from your own previous version. I thought after waiting nearly two years for End-to-End encryption I could finally move my 700+ journal entries over from DayOne to DayOne 2 and enjoy multiple journals and multiple pictures. Their proprietary syncing option is much faster than the previous version and with end-to-end, you can at least trust theyre not snooping on you. I understand why they removed 3rd party sync - iCloud is a pain to program complex files for, and adding end-to-end encryption through someone elses sync is a daunting, if not impossible task. I also understand the subscription model - its difficult to create and support an app, your own servers, etc, with pay once pricing. I dont think the pricing is way out of line if you can trust the developers and are happy with the service. For someone who uses this app daily, I can understand that pricing. HOWEVER - they changed how they handle markdown (so its this weird psuedo markdown, youll be frustrated), and my 700+ entries formatting is all screwed up. I thought it was a bug, so I sent in a note. I was told: "Thanks for contacting us and sorry for the troubles youre experiencing. Ill do my best to help you. We changed Markdown editors and web views in Day One 2.0 and that probably caused the issue. Unfortunately I do not have an adequate solution. " They changed the fundamental behaviour of line breaks, (something which drastically changes how your paragraphs are displayed), with zero mention of it. I now have over 700 entries that need reformatting. Thats thousands of paragraphs that need fixing. The explanation I was given: "It is a development and design choice." Thats a really big change to toss at your users with no method for an easy fix, with no actual explanation for why. And its that lack of rationale that leaves me in the difficult position of having to recommend users think twice about choosing DayOne. If I cant trust that my journals arent going to be safe going forward, that "design & development" choices are going to unecessarily create work for me, or destroy carefully crafted content, then I cant trust the developer. Period. I need to be able to trust that my journals are going to be readable down the line, and not going to require maintenance everytime theres an update. The goodwilll from the original DayOne has run out.

When it gets secure key encryption to protect it it will be perfect because it is almost perfect now for journaling but has serious security issues. Including that it transmits unencrypted. You just have to download the app in a new device and it will show up without even password protection.

I had Classic on my Mac and 2.3 on my iPhone and iPad. I have nothing but problems with synching the data. The only device that the count was aligning with what the day One cloud was the iPad. The iPhone never met reached the count goal. So I went back to Day One Classic. It is easy, clean and does what i need it to do - everything else 2.3 did was glitz and overkill. Day One Classic synchs perfectly with all my devices. No more issues. No more worries.

Ive been using this since 2012. Its a great upgrade to be able to see my past entries for the day. Also, Im really impressed with the ease in upgrading from classic. I had thousands of entries and was nervous, but it worked easily. If I could include short videos, it would be even better, but as is, it still has great features.

This app is absolutely essential and well worth the subscription price. Now, I wonder if we could get a dark mode...

first they removed dropbox sync (free in Day One Classic), then iCloud sync (free), and now charge for their own sync service. yuck

I like D1 very much. I wish you just have let D1 Classic owners use automatic backup to iCloud(without syncing between devices). I just need one Journal and automatic backup, $35/yearly is very expensive for me.