Speaker 1: Have you noticed that the iPhone has been trying to fix us? This little screen in our pocket is keeping track of so many things in our life. It’s smart enough to give us suggestions and now a major selling point of the iPhone is how those suggestions can make you a better you go to sleep sooner. Change your display color at night so you can calm down. Would you like to take a moment to reflect on how you feel right now? Wait. Hold the phone back. Your eyes are too close to the screen. And you know what? Your music is too loud, but good job. Your screen time [00:00:30] is down this week. Would you like to do one more thing on this screen before you go to bed? Yeah, that one more thing lately for me has been the Apple Journal app. It’s a new tool that is designed to help you reflect and practice gratitude through writing about moments in your day. Speaker 1: I have been using it for the past month and aspects of this app are not what I expected. Maybe Apple wanted to break our expectations to repair our minds, or maybe it’s not that deep and it’s just different. I’m Bridget Carey, and this is one more thing. [00:01:00] Apple announced journal way back in June at WDC as an Iowas 17 feature, but this app needed some more time to bake. It was not included in the first Iowas 17 release. I have been testing it out for a month with the public beta version of iOS 17.2. It should be very close to the experience that many folks will have at the official launch, and that could be any day now. The journal app is not just a place to jot down thoughts on blank pages. I have [00:01:30] plenty of blank journals that I never write in already, but for some reason I keep buying them because they’re pretty. Speaker 1: When I am burnt out after a long day, I’m not grabbing this. Instead, I’m doing what any sane person does. I’m scrolling through my phone in bed. Yes, suddenly it makes sense to journal at night in the phone when I don’t already have a habit of writing in a notebook. I open the journal app and right away when I click to make a post, I get personalized suggestions on what to write about. Now for this video, I’m going to hide [00:02:00] or blur some of what’s on my screen because it gets real detailed. It pulls from my recent activity, like the photos I took, the people I texted with a map of places I went to, music I’ve listened to, and if I ever logged a workout on my Apple watch, it would show me that too. It also weaves in photo memories from several years back and it throws in prompts of ideas and questions to reflect about. Speaker 1: So the prompts, they’re not cheesy. I find them to be interesting when you want to zoom out a bit [00:02:30] with a thought exercise. Now scrolling through my suggestions, I see a Friday night hangout with friends. I see my son when he was real little from three years ago. I see a question prompt. I see my family picking out a Christmas tree from this weekend. I see photos of my dad visiting New York from 2018, and I see a reminder that I ate at Wendy’s last week. Of course not everything is worthy of making a post about it, but you are getting this little flashback jolt as your brain replays memories without you trying. Some [00:03:00] of the suggestions can be a little strange when you realize that your iPhone is digging up these old baby photos to hit you in the fields, and then it also knows when you went to Wendy’s at this exact location. Speaker 1: Would you like to write about Wendy’s? Okay. Clearly, you start to see that your phone knows a lot about your life and your burger consumption habits. Apple says this is all being done while protecting your privacy. The raw suggested post from your activities stays inside the iPhone and Apple cannot see it. Same goes for any third [00:03:30] party journal app that decides to use Apple’s journaling suggestion tool. API Apple’s website says that no one, but you can access your journal and even if your phone is unlocked, and let’s say you hand your phone to someone for a bit, they cannot get into the app because you could lock access to the app itself. I set it to unlock with a face Id check, and if you sync it to iCloud, it’s going to be stored with end-to-end encryption. So far, the app is almost always hitting me with kid photo memories, [00:04:00] trying to give me a dopamine hit with all the nostalgia like, Hey, remember this cute moment. Speaker 1: I guess my problems today aren’t so big. If I think about the nice stuff of the past, it’s like a therapist guiding you to reset your perspectives. Now, there are some mistakes. I’ve noticed once I got my nails done early in the morning and the app assumed that I was having breakfast at a restaurant next door. I suppose it’s okay if it’s not perfect. It’s just meant to be a starting point for your little dear diary moment. You don’t have to write a post for every suggestion. There are also limits to what media you can [00:04:30] use. You could make an entry using photos, audio, or video, but video files need to be under 500 megabytes, so a two minute video that is shot in 4K was not something I could add. Limiting the size of your files could actually help save your storage. You see your entries are stored locally on your iPhone, so every time you add a photo or a video, that’s more storage being used up so far, everything here is what I expected. Speaker 1: You got this fancy little digital diary, but what I’m about to say [00:05:00] sounds strange, but here’s what I did not expect. I didn’t expect that there’s no way to share any of these posts, and it’s not just no sharing, it’s no searching. So yeah, I can’t go, oh, I remember that nice Halloween post. Let me pull up that photo and share it. No, no, nothing is shareable. So you are crafting what looked like classic Facebook posts, but it’s just for you. No one will know about this post. Yeah, too many years with the iPhone and social media has clearly messed me up. I can’t [00:05:30] fathom making content that no one else will see. I realize that I have to rethink a few things about the value of writing about my memories and the no searching part is kind of a bummer. You may think, oh, when did we do that trip? Speaker 1: I know I’ll just go into my journal and look it up, but searching is just scrolling backward. The best you can do is bookmark some of your favorite posts because you can narrow down entries by filtering it by what is bookmarked or filter it by just showing you photos or audio or locations. So I guess scrolling is kind of [00:06:00] flipping through the pages of a written journal, but then what’s the point of journaling digitally? Okay, it’s easier. The iPhone is serving it all up to me, but also maybe it’s so that you’re even more locked into, depending on your iPhone. Imagine a year goes by, you made over 100, maybe 200 posts all stored on the iPhone. Would you just throw that away? Just toss out your diary and switch to Android. Apple found yet another way to make you not want to leave iOS for Android. [00:06:30] I’m not the only scene editor that has been testing out journal in beta. Our managing editor and iPhone reviewer, Patrick Holland has been playing with it, so what are his first impressions? Speaker 2: Well, like you, I’ve enjoyed the journal app so far, but sadly, I haven’t had any prompts to relive that great frosty and fries experience I had at Wendy’s. What surprises me about Journal is, well, how on Apple it is the star of the app or the suggestions and how easily they trigger a memory or make me relive a moment that at the time seemed otherwise [00:07:00] mundane and now resonates with all the feels. What journal does best is give me a space for my feelings in a way to organize my thoughts. The suggestions are very personal and private. There was one that made me want to call my family and another where I wished I still could, and I’m glad Apple is opening up the suggestions and prompts aspect of the app to others to adopt. I could see a wellness app like Lira incorporate them in its journaling feature, which [00:07:30] I hope they do. Oh, and one more thing. The experience of using Journal reminds me of the analog experiences I had doing creative writing exercises or following the book the artist way, and I definitely recommend checking it out. What do you think, Bridget? Speaker 1: I would say it is worth trying the journal app. Sure. There are things I think could be tweaked, like adding a way to search for a post or linking me back to the photo inside my photo library so that I can share the actual photo of acute moment [00:08:00] that was served up to me. But if the job of journal was to help my mental health to fix some of the busy brain problems we have in this day and age, yeah, it gave me some perspective help with exercises that I did not do before. It made me think about what really matters a little more. I don’t do it every night, but with how fast time flies by. I think just opening the app and looking back helps put time into perspective. Let me know what you think of a journal app and if you’d be interested in trying this out, or maybe there’s something else in Iowa 17.2 [00:08:30] that you’re more interested in, you can let me know in the comments or just don’t let me know. Write it in your journal and never send it to anyone. I’ll catch you next Friday for one more thing.
