One Year with the Apple Journal App: New iOS 18 Updates, How I Use It For Journaling & Exploring the Room For Improvement
What has changed with iOS 18, How I use it for journaling, Making it work on the Mac & iPad and the Room For Improvement
At the end of the day or week, you have a lot of stuff to share with your best friend — gossip, life updates, throwbacks, questions, answers to their questions, etc but it turns out you or they are too busy to connect then.
When you finally get the chance to connect with them, you… completely forget what you had to tell them.
Or miss out on the important details.
Or the story you are narrating to your friends doesn’t sound as good as it did in your head.
If this has happened to you before then this story is meant just for you! Without spending a single penny, I will show you how you can narrate stories to your friends without missing out on a single detail.
About a year ago, Apple introduced a new app with the iOS 17 update. It was the Journal app and it came with some quality life updates, both for its users and the iOS APIs. The app made it possible to integrate with other native apps and bring some of their data home making it possible for users to journal about a song or podcast they heard (on Apple Music/Podcast), a workout they recorded (using Fitness), and even photos they took and saved in their Photo Library. When this app launched almost a year ago, I wrote a complete guide for this amazing app, which you can find below:
Apple’s All-New JOURNAL App — Everything You Need To Know!
Apple’s new Journal app for the iPhone helps its users log their thoughts and reflections anytime, anywhere. This…medium.com
With iOS 18, Apple updated this app yet again. And it’s been somewhat of a hit or miss. Hit because it still tops the chart when we talk of quality-of-life apps and so every update to it is meaningful. And a miss because Apple didn’t give us everything we asked for. More on that in the next few sections but first — Let’s talk about all the new updates coming to the native Journal app with iOS 18.
👉 TABLE OF CONTENTS 👈
1. The New Updates
Landing Page
Journal Entry
Notifications
Home Screen Widgets & Lock Screen Complications
Settings
2. How I Use It For Journaling
Making It Work On My Mac & iPad
3. What Needs To Improve
...And Why I Still Love Journal Despites Its FlawsThe New Updates
Landing Page
When you open Journal for the first time on iOS 18, you will notice some changes right at the top of the app where it says ‘Journal’.
Right below the app name, you have a bunch of Journalling Insights that show your Weekly journal streak, Words written, and Number of days you have journaled. When you tap any of these three insights, the entire ‘Insights’ page pops up.
This Insights page has three sections — Streaks, Stats, and Calendar that build up on the previous three insights you saw on the landing page. The Streaks has three insights tiles. When you tap on each one, you can see them maximize and see more insightful journaling data about your streaks. Among these ‘Current Streaks’ insight is the only one with a miscellaneous menu that allows you to choose whether you want to see daily or weekly journalling streaks, modify the notifications for the app, or share your streaks with others.
The next section is the Stats which shows you a bunch of colorful tiles that show you the number of journal entries, number of days journaled, locations visited (and journaled about), and words written. These titles can be tapped to make them bigger to see more insightful data about these stats.
Finally, the last section is Calendar. This shows you the monthly calendar with purple dots below the days you have journaled. Tapping on these dates takes you to a new page showing the specific journal entries or entries you have logged on that day. You could add new entries for this day using the ‘+’ at the top-right corner and check out entries from the previous or next day by tapping the ‘<-’ or ‘->’ buttons at the bottom.
Now let’s go back to the landing page. There are two more changes over here — a Search button replacing the Filter menu for journal entries filtering and a new Miscellaneous menu that allows you to sort entries by moment date or entry date, check the Insights (the page we just discussed), change notification settings, change health access settings, lock your journal or print it.
I love these new in-app settings and they save you enough time spent going all the way to the Settings app.
You would want your entries to be sorted by moment date as it will make your journal entries more chronological. However, you can sort it by entry date or let the app switch between the moment and the entry date.
Health Access settings are something new. You will find two toggles here — the first one is Mindful Minutes allowing you to log your journalling time as mindful minutes within the health app and the second is State of Mind which allows you to journal about your logged state of mind within Journal. I have the second toggle (State of Mind) turned on but I find Mindful Minutes annoying since it adds Mindfulness to my workouts too within Fitness.
Locking Journal can now be toggled within the app. It takes you to Settings and prompts you to enter a password to lock the Journal app.
The new setting is the Print option. You could either print all the entries or choose a date range for the entries you want printed or exported as a zip file with PDF journal entries.
Back on the landing page when you tap on the miscellaneous menu right below any journal entry, you can find this ‘Print’ option that allows exporting or printing specific journal entries as a PDF. The portrait or landscape orientation while printing works well with orienting your journal entry on the page.
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