Five Minute Journal

What's the idea here? You don't write a diary. You answer a few questions.

In the morning the app walks you through a short set of prompts. At night it does it again, asking things like what went well today. Each answer is a line or two. That's your entry.

Why does that work? Because the blank page is what kills most diaries. You sit down, can't think what to say, and close the app. Here somebody else does the asking.

It's the same format as Intelligent Change's paper journal. So if you've filled in the book, you already know the drill.

There's a bit of fun round the edges. A quote every day, a small challenge every week, and a streak that counts how long you've kept it up.

And your entries aren't trapped. You can lock the app with a passcode or Face ID, and export to PDF, HTML or Dropbox for any dates you pick. All of that is free.

It's phones and tablets only. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Android. There's no web version and no desktop app, so you can't type an entry at your laptop.

It's narrow on purpose, too. Want to pour out three pages about your day? Free writing lives in a notes section, and that's Premium. So are photos, video, your own questions, the mood tracker and the home screen widget.

Photos are the sore one. Long-time users remember a daily photo being part of the app they'd paid for once. In 2021 it switched to a subscription, and the photo went with it.

Then there's privacy. Your entries are kept on Intelligent Change's servers, going by its privacy policy, and we saw no mention of end-to-end encryption. Day One has that on its free plan.

The App Store privacy label also lists identifiers under data used to track you. Not what you want to read about a diary.

And there's now an AI coach called Eva that reads an entry and reflects on it with you. The policy says nothing goes to the outside AI service, which it names as Anthropic's Claude, until you agree in the app. Read that screen before you tap yes.

Start free, and you might just stay there. The free version has the full morning and evening routine, reminders, streaks, the lock and export.

Premium is for the extras: photos and video, your own questions, the notes section, the mood tracker and On this Day.

What does it cost? Intelligent Change's site doesn't say, so we're going by the US App Store. That lists Premium at $9.99 for a month or $39.99 for a year. Yearly works out about 67% cheaper than twelve monthly payments.

Confusingly, the same list has cheaper items as well: $4.99 monthly and $19.99 to $24.99 yearly, some marked for existing users. We can't tell you who gets those. Check the price on your own screen before you subscribe.

The yearly plan is listed with a 3-day free trial. Three days isn't long, so set a reminder if you're only having a look.

There's a lifetime option too, going by the help centre. No price is published for it.

The app has 4.8 on the App Store from about 17,600 ratings.

What do people like? That it's short. Reviewers say they'd been through longer journaling apps and dropped them, and kept this one going because an entry takes a minute or two. One went through six gratitude apps before settling here.

A few say the daily quote or affirmation gets them through a rough patch. One was job hunting, and said it kept them going through the rejections.

Now the other side. In spring 2021 the app had a big redesign and moved to a subscription, and a lot of long-time users were furious. Some were locked out of their accounts for days and thought years of entries were gone. Earlier buyers were given a year of Premium free, which plenty felt wasn't enough.

That was five years ago, and the newer reviews shown on the listing are much kinder. Still, it tells you something about how a big change was handled.

Hacker News had nothing on it in the last two years, so all of this is from the App Store.