> 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.<p>> It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends.<p>Basically a big FU to all the independent devs trying to compete on a fair playing field.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinion.com/2016/05/09/heyday-photo-app-review/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinio...</a>
> <i>It could monitor users' activities through the day in ways other apps can't.</i><p>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.
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.<p><i>"It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends."</i><p>That could be really useful for tracking down illegal immigrants, gays, and politicians meeting with lobbyists.
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.
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.<p>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.
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 ;)].<p>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.<p>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. <i>But</i> – 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.<p>[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 <i>at best</i>; don't listen to me.<p>[1] <a href="https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-model-that-can-draw-everything-in-your-pocket/" rel="nofollow">https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-mo...</a>
This is good news.<p>For those who don't know, journalling apps universally suck. Especially when it comes to security.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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
> <i>"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."</i><p>Apple Notes introduces neural-engine powered "Clippy"?<p>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.<p>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>I remember I was talking to Joseph and then saw a really cool webpage</i>).<p>A lot of the time the act of journaling is writing <i>about</i> 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.<p>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.<p>This whole product is frankly quite a bit overdue.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>(FWIW I've spent the last year designing an OS for a new tablet platform with journaling as a central experience)<p>[1]: <a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou</a>
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.<p>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.<p>[1](<a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity</a>)<p>[2](<a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit</a>)<p>[3](<a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquantitytypeidentifier/1615548-stepcount" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquanti...</a>)<p>[4](<a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinicaltypeidentifier/2976211-medicationrecord" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinic...</a>)
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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.