- The journaling app will collect more user data than competitors.
- It will have suggestions but those will be removed after four weeks.
- Wether the app will be free or require a subscription is unclear.
The iPhone maker is planning a journaling app for iOS as part of its work on mental and physical health. The app will likely be preloaded with new iPhones and on to the next iOS version, reports The Wall Street Journal.
With many such apps on the App Store, the first-party offering will face fierce competition as a new entrant. However, according to the documents seen by WSJ, it will be able to gather more user data and access phone calls and text messages. It will analyze users’ behavior to track a typical day, their time at home or otherwise, and so on. This way, it can figure out when there are doing something out of the ordinary.
The journaling app can also suggest topics for journaling—which will disappear after four weeks—and a feature called “All Day People Discovery” to detect physical proximity to other people. The app will look to figure out who a user is around in terms of friends, colleagues, etc. The app will explain how it uses this data, and all analysis will happen on device.
Apple has a history of being more privacy-preserving, even to the point of losing competitive advantage. That makes me far more likely to give Apple the benefit of the doubt.
Jon Callas, Director of public-interest technology at the digital civil-liberties nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The app is code-named Jurassic and could be announced at WWDC in June as a part of iOS 17.
In a conversation with WSJ, Mr. Mayne, the founder of Day One, a popular journaling app, said that Apple supported the app significantly since its launch, featuring it prominently on the App Store. It even won the Apple Design Award in 2014. It grew substantially before the support dropped about three years ago. Mr. Mayne believed Apple must’ve started working on its own app.
A journaling app, in a way, is as essential as a weather app, and launching a first-party option that comes preloaded on the iPhone might be a challenge for third-party apps in the same category. We will know more once WWDC approaches. The event is scheduled to take place from June 5 to June 9 and be available to stream online.
