In July 2023, I deleted the Day One journaling app from my phone and laptop. It was perhaps the best thing I’ve done as a lifelong diarist.
The decision was prompted by Apple announcing its Journal app at WWDC that year. In that keynote, Apple said it would use “on-device machine learning” to provide prompts based on the content in your iPhone — things like contacts, photos, music, workouts, podcasts, and location data. The idea gave me the ick. Mainly because the app was described as…
