Personally I'm not remotely interested in this and all the data it accesses. I hope it can 100% deleted.
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WSJ: Apple to Release iPhone Journaling App for Logging Daily Activities
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Sounds like the app will be aimed at the potentially millions of users who currently don’t have a journaling habit, won’t ever pay a subscription for journaling app, and might see themselves benefiting from such an action. It will also presumably be integrated with the health app in a way that third party apps won’t (and can’t).
Looking forward to seeing the new app from Apple
True, and it also seems to me that there is valid reason for everyone to be suspicious of how much personal data they entrust to anyone or to any app.
Aggregating a wide range of on-device or in-cloud data into a single package means giving access to all of this data to a single, all-powerful service. This alone merits serious concern.
In the end, it all boils down to trust, a personal decision based on how you use the app or service and what its value is to you. Some people choose to trust Apple or Microsoft or Google or a third-party provider or the local or federal/national government with their data, for whatever reason. There are grounds for exercising caution in this regard.
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A fine idea, if you want a dystopia à la the Minority Report.
Actually, Day One is not under the same ownership as it was when it first launched many years ago. It's now under the banner of Automattic, the company that brings us WordPress.com. The question then remains as to whether you choose to trust Automattic with your data, just as you trust Apple.
Day One journal data is end-to-end encrypted by default as they state, so if that is accurate, you should have no worries. Day One's encryption has also been audited by a third-party, according to the company.
Also, don't take a rumor for the truth. We have no idea how this theoretical Apple app/service launch will affect Day One, or what feature set it will actually bring.
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Which two apps would you like to see go and get a journaling app in return?
You accidentally forgot to label your fan fiction.
Yes, really. I hate subscriptions ad nauseum. I paid for Day One and loved it. I would pay for Day One 2.0, but they decided to go subscription, so I stopped using it. I completely understand that software development is expensive and updates are necessary, but my wallet is not a dairy cow to be milked relentlessly; so I make appropriate decisions to my financial ability as they relate to my needs. My iPhone does so much more than a simple journaling app, so it’s value is easily worth 40x. Your comparison and logic are flawed.
Subscriptions can be a nuisance and even seem like an insult to the "old-timers" who are used to the idea of "buying outright" the software that they use (which itself might be a misnomer, if you check the Terms of Use for the software you've actually "purchased" outright—a more appropriate term might be "licensed for permanent use" in many cases).
That said, it seems unfair to call out @stephenschimpf for his decision to pay a subscription fee for Day One. He apparently feels that the value is there and that the developers deserve to get paid for their ongoing work on the app, and for keeping the servers running where his journals and data are stored. That's his decision, and nothing is wrong with his logic. The service may not be as complicated as a hardware device like an iPhone, but it certainly has value for him. It seems only fair to acknowledge that it's his personal decision, one that's just as valid as your decision or my decision to buy into any service or gadget.
You mentioned that you paid for Day One as well before it went to a subscription model. If the app had a major update every year for an upgrade fee of $29.95 (for example), would you have paid that? What would be the difference then between paying an equivalent yearly subscription fee as opposed to the yearly upgrade fee? Obviously, you are tied into the service with a subscription and possibly locked out if you stop paying. That's the disadvantage of many subscription services, and I could easily understand your logic if you were arguing that the risk of tying your data to a subscription isn't worth it. But financially speaking, for people who frequently upgraded their software "purchases" anyway, it could be argued that subscriptions might offer a better value, in certain cases.
For the record, I started with Day One as a one-time purchase way back in the day, over a decade ago when it first got started with Bloom. At the time, you could use Dropbox, and later iCloud as well as offline storage. Dropbox and iCloud sync each had their issues (I had at least a few e-mail discussions with their support about certain unreliable aspects of the sync back then, and the company was well aware of it), which prompted Bloom to build and launch their own Day One sync service. (They also had a security breach some time after that, where some user data was leaked to other users, an issue that they obviously had to fix, and one which also probably accelerated their efforts towards building E2E encryption into their sync processes.) I actually abandoned the software after they announced they went to the subscription model. I used Ulysses for a while, but then that, too went the way of subscriptions. I think it was about three years ago that I decided to revisit Day One, as I believe I had been "grandfathered" into the Plus plan. Upgrading to the Premium features like audio transcription to text seemed like it was worthy of the price (for my needs), and sync with the Day One servers has been typically pretty fast and reliable, so I've stuck with the subscription.
It's hard to get away from subscriptions these days. It's much like cable TV or Internet service. Either you find value in it and keep paying for the right to use the software, or you find something else. It all boils down to personal preference, whether you think there's something that works better for you that you don't have to pay as much for. (I'm sure I'll change my mind about subscriptions after I retire or if my main source of income ever goes away...)
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Thanks for your reply. Yes, I am an old-timer... if 40+ is considered old now. I buy most of my software outright. Yes, it's licensed for permanent use, but it's that permanence I'm paying for.
I wasn't calling him out specifically for his decision to sub to SaaS. I don't care on what they spend their money. I was calling out the fallacy of equating a $1000 iPhone (which I own permanently until I sell or trade it in) to a $25/yr sub (which does not have that aforementioned permanence). The comparison doesn't equate. And there was no malice. I was simply defending my own stance and showing them the disconnect of the comparison.
It's my "old-timer" expectation that software I buy maintains functionality for 2+ years as in the good old days. I remember when Photoshop lasted 5+ years between version. In Day One's case, I'm pretty sure I can still use my original purchase with its original grandfathered functionality to this day. I don't get access to the new features, which is fine, but the core features I agreed to pay for are still there should I choose to use them. Therefore, the $8 I spent for Day One v1.9 back in Dec 2013 can be broken down over the 9.5 years as about $0.75/yr. This makes it a vastly better cost/yr value by 40x (given the 9 year cost of $269.55 for the sub). Obviously, this is a bit of an outlier data point; however, had I chosen to upgrade based on major version releases over the last 9.5 years, I would have saved at least half that as I don't believe there have been 20 major revisions (I haven't been following development). Again, I would rather pay for that permanence and opt into new features as they are released. If v2023 offered some must-have feature set, I would have gladly paid to upgrade. However, being locked into a subscription, paying for the development of features I may not want or need, seems like a waste to me, financially speaking. To answer your question though, no, I would not upgrade yearly, only as necessary for new desirable features.
I agree with this point completely. Managing subscriptions has become a burden on the consumer. Some people chose to pay hundreds of dollars a month on software (that's more than a car-note for some). I do not see the wisdom in this. I do pay for some subscriptions: subs where content is changing monthly (Apple Music, Netflix) or there is some form of cloud storage that is necessary to maintain functionality (like Apple One and Parcel) or it's related to business necessity and the cost is paid for by monthly work (like Photoshop or Microsoft Office). But 90% of my software is bought in perpetuity.
My biggest concern is that this sense of choice is vanishing. If I can choose to buy upfront, I will. But many times a sub is the only means to supporting software and that's where I have to make decisions... which are usually not in favor of the developer. I hope that long diatribe brings clarity and wisdom. It went on a lot longer than I wanted. Have a good day friendly internet stranger.
All excellent points, and you made your case easily understandable!
Me too. The calendar is already there, with no pressure to enter something for every day, and I get to see the other calendar events and holidays for context.
It's one of those types of apps that only Apple can do well on iPhone as they'd have full access to locations, messages, health (Apple Watch), Photos, Safari, and other app activity across devices...
Especially the ability to get anything out of the app. Day One has multiple options for taking the data out of the app and using it as you see fit. You can also publish right out of it. Apple removed publishing with photos a while back, and getting anything out of notes in bulk is awful. Unless Apple has a sea change in the way it lets you export your thoughts from the walled garden, I can’t see myself leaving Day One.
The way I understand the current architecture of macOS, Apple does not automatically get access to your location, messages, health data, photos and so on. That access has to be granted on a per-app basis by the user. I obviously don't understand the full underpinnings of the source code and probably never will, but that is Apple's stance on giving permissions to data and services. (An example for granting permissions to apps to use photos [Apple website]: Control access to your photos on Mac)
I only say this because some people may misconstrue what you said as believing that just because it's an Apple-made app, they automatically would have access to all of your data. I don't believe that Apple has some secret backdoor to your data in that regard, as that would go against everything they are trying to accomplish with their privacy initiatives. They have refused access to on-device data even to federal governments unless there is a legal need in a criminal case and so on.
You can try and test out my theory by doing a clean install of the latest version of macOS on your machine, and see what prompts you are getting on setup, which data the OS is asking permission to get, and whether you can still access that data from other apps without giving your express consent.
I'm not saying that it's a perfect system, and there have been security issues reported even with Apple-developed apps. Users need to remain savvy and wary, and that's increasingly hard to do as the workings of the OS itself becomes more and more opaque. Apple along with other manufactures still have a long way to go, but what I am saying is that Apple does not (or at least should not, in a perfect world) have an advantage in terms of handling your personal data.
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Accessing the data is fine, but I've found that when you want to switch journaling platforms, export from any kind of journaling app has always been a harrowing matter.
As you correctly said, journaling apps generally let you export the data, specify the range, data that matches certain conditions like tags and so on. The problem lies on the receiving end.
For instance, it's fine if you can export your data to DOCX or TXT format, but then what do you do when you want to re-import (migrate) your data into a different journaling or writing app? From my experience, journaling apps all have their own formats in which they expect to see the import data. If you have several years or more worth of data, it can be a real mess to try and move it elsewhere. It may take hours and even days of work to do so.
I went through this when I quit Day One (after they moved to the subscription-only model) and tried to migrate my data into Ulysses. Then, some years late after I re-evaluated Day One and decided it was worth it after all to pay for the Premium sub and move my data back in, I had to reimport my data from Ulysses into Day One. Years have passed, and I'm still not finished (I still have about three years' worth of data that's "orphaned" in Ulysses, that I need to reformat for import into Day One). The process can be automated somewhat if you're handy with Word wildcards or regex+find & replace, and even better if you can write some code (AppleScript, for example) to do the heavy lifting... but that in itself is a chore.
You raised some excellent points which I don't think a lot of people consider, especially when subbing or buying an app. When it comes to journaling, I think it is wise to have a second journal to text app for backup purposes. That way, you have your data in a way you are happy with.
Things were so much easier when we just wrote things down with pen/pencil and paper...
...but actually, I find that the advantages of keeping journals in digital format outweigh the complexities and disadvantages vs. paper & pencil, at least for me. Searchability has been really useful for me., especially as I get older. I often forget when I did this or that in the past, when I purchased this or that and where, when my family took XXX vacation, when I said this and that to people and so on. If I had to go back and look through dozens of my old paper notebook journals to find something, it's likely that I'd spend far more time and have much less success in doing so.
Actually, I even tried doing both for a time, sort of like you said but in an "analog" + digital format. I'd write my journal entries in a paper notebook, and then later use Day One's transcription feature to create digital entries of the same. Naturally, I soon found that this took a great deal of time, even though transcription has come a long way in recent years.
What would be great is if I could easily scan all of my paper journals and have it properly OCR everything into text format, automagically creating journal entries corresponding to each date or at least TXT files. The fact that I often journal in more than one language presents an even greater hurdle for something like this to work.
Anyway, I imagine that this matter of migrating data is going to be a stickler if Apple actually does release their own "journaling" app, and users decide that they want to migrate everything from their previous app(s) to the stock Apple offering. Apple Notes is still kind of anemic in terms of its import functionality (it supports
.txt/.rtf/.rtfd/.html as of now). I remember trying to import a lot of data from Evernote into Notes, and was quite disappointed to find that the voice recordings from Evernote didn't port over, among other things.
For that matter, it would be great if all of these note-taking and journaling apps would support a universal standard for porting data back/forth between them. Not just in terms of file formats, but in terms of the formatting and fields used for export/import as well, how the data should be properly defined and formatted for export. Note-taking and journaling apps are so ubiquitous now, there should be some agreement and standard for going back and forth to avoid as much data loss as possible.