Save your ideas, thoughts, and memories with Day One [50 Essential iOS Apps #48]

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Day One journal entry on iPhone with Day one on iPad in background
Day One makes it easy to create a vibrant and modern journal documenting and archiving your life.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

50 Essential iOS Apps: Day OneResearch shows that keeping a journal is great for your mind. It allows you to clear your thoughts or think through problems in different ways. Finding a good way to journal is easy with the Day One app. Designed to provide a feature-rich, modern journaling experience, Day One gives you the ability to keep track of, write about, or create a virtual archive of almost anything you want.

What is Day One?

Day One is a journaling app for iOS (and macOS), focused on creating media-rich archives of your life. The app can also integrate with your social media accounts, photo library, calendar, and more to add additional context to your journal.

Why it’s great

Day One’s support for including weather information, daily step count, location data, and media make it a vibrant way to journal your life. Instead of Apple Notes packed with plain text or paper journals that don’t give context to the day, Day One brings your journal to life.

Day One’s design is another great feature. By using bright colors, bold fonts, and allowing for rich text formatting, your journal feels modern. To make it even better, you can create multiple journals, allowing you to organize things based on a topic or theme. Each journal can be set a different color, allowing you to differentiate each one. This is useful for journaling about family, work, or projects and vacations without mixing your content.

Day One app screenshots of journals, entries, new item, and calendar
With Day One, you can create multiple journals, add text, links, songs, and images to entries, and enjoy an on-going log of your life.
Screenshots: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

Day One’s support for importing from your “activity feed” (photos, social services, locations, etc.) allows you to quickly add journal entries without needing to write a word. This also adds to the depth your journals, making them more enjoyable to look back on.

A final great feature is the app’s share sheet action. From any website, image, or highlighted text, you can quickly create journal entries. This is useful when you want to add something to your journal without spending time crafting more in-depth thoughts, or without needing to switch tasks to add a new entry.

Who it’s for

If you keep a paper journal, but are ready to go digital, Day One is for you. It is also excellent if you want to create a multimedia-rich archive of your life.

Bottom line: Day One is the best journaling app

If you’re looking for a way to go digital with your journaling, give Day One a try. It packs excellent, modern features and is simple to use, making it the best journaling app on iOS.

Price: Free (upgrade to Pro for $24.99/year).

Download from: App Store

See more of our 50 Essential iOS Apps

Want more essential iOS app reviews? Check out our ongoing series, 50 Essential iOS Apps.

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