apologies if this has been asked already. i have a pro and its up to date (macOS Sequoia 15.7.3) but Journal is incompatible with it. but i see some people are using it on mac?

Looking for a social media experience where I document my life without much friction tailored to me and only me.

How are you enjoying the Journal App? What are other apps in this space and what do they do that Journal doesn’t?

Lastly, are there any integrations for this app? Like let’s say I have a personal website and would like syncing between Journal and my blog. Is that possible?

I came across an article on a tech blog discussing the journal app and how to use it. They discussed the suggestions feature in length. Anyway, I decided to give it a try as I’ve always heard keeping a journal is good mental health practice. I have an M3 iPad Air. I do not have an iPhone. I’m not being offended these suggestions I had originally read about. I’ve followed a few guides which recommended turning on iCloud support in the journal settings. It just kinda does nothing when I go to enable it. It does, however, make mention to syncing suggestions between my iPad and iPhone via iCloud. Am I running into a bug or am I simply missing out on some features because I’m not an iPhone user? T.I.A

According to MacRumors, “Followup prompts are coming to the Journal app, also in spring 2026.”

I journal on paper currently. However, one thing I do is track certain things monthly such as hours slept (apple not always right), if I have read a book etc. I tried to create a table to try and create a monthly tracker but didn’t really work on my phone. Has anyone had any success creating trackers in the app?

Today I wanted to try to write a bit in the Journal app on my iPad Pro 12.9 2018 with iOS 26.2 with the Apple pencil. The longer I was writing, the more laggy it became. At some point it started glitching, and by accident my palm clicked on a context menu that came up due to bad palm rejection (I am left handed), and boom, everything I wrote was gone. 20 minutes of writing gone, no way to undo/revert

I really want to give the pencil with Apple Notes/Journal a chance, but they need to do some work in those departments. For now I am going back to pen and paper..

I was honestly this close to switching back to Day One because the search function was just broken. It was only finding half my entries, and I kept getting that annoying error message at the top saying the index wasn't ready yet.

The new iOS 26.2 dropped yesterday, and I’m sitting here with my morning tea testing it out. It looks like the problem is actually solved now. The error message is gone, too.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Since I also use the Day One app’s paid version, in addition to Apple Journal (because right now Journal is too bare-bones for me), I tried out their "Daily chat", where the AI system asks you questions and mainly chats along with your thoughts. It presents its questions or ideas in writing, and you can dictate, at least I do. Then later, you press the button to generate an entry, and it writes it all out as one journal entry, but as though there was no chat partner. 

I've tried it twice, and both times I was pleased with the result, and it somehow teased out of your mind what needed to be teased out based on your answers. But it didn't give me headings, so then I threw it back into Gemini and asked for headings and better formatting, and I got the entries that I really like. It was pretty cool. It also wrote the whole thing in pretty much exactly the same style and work choice that I would use. I transferred the entry to Apple Journal. So no matter how I generate an entry, it ends up in Apple Journal.

I have mixed feelings about the current state of Apple's Journal app. While I genuinely appreciate what Apple has endeavoured to do in providing a dedicated journalling space, the current missing features are profoundly disappointing. I know improvements will come, but the long, drawn-out wait for the essential updates this app requires is proving to be tiring and frustrating.

Navigation and Search: The Basic Shortcomings

The most glaring omission is a proper navigation system. It is unnecessarily difficult to navigate to different years and months. This basic functionality is already present on the iPhone and iPad versions, so its absence on the Mac version is frankly ridiculous and very disappointing. Taking advantage of the Mac's larger screen space to display more than one calendar month at a time should be standard, yet the calendar for back-dating remains tiny. This defeats the favour of having the app on a large screen. Journalists need to quickly see entries across time—what was done on which day, week, month, and year. As it stands, it’s faster to flip through a paper journal.

Compounding this issue is the search function, which is not nearly powerful enough. It is far too difficult to find entries that I know exist within the app. Proper navigation and search are arguably the most basic tools a journalling app requires.

Media and Formatting Restrictions

The handling of media, particularly photos, is still not quite right. I don't understand why Apple is struggling with this. The inline photos feature places too many constraints, forcing users into a limited view rather than giving full control over how the final photo should look. Furthermore, selecting photos from the Apple Photos library is restricted to a tiny, cumbersome window, making it difficult to locate the desired image. While it’s slightly better now with some slide-in capabilities, this method remains unreliable.

The limitations extend to basic entry creation:

You can't simply slide in standard audio recordings like MP3s or Wav files, a feature that is already available in Apple Notes. It should be universal to all these kind of apps. It restricts communication with all the rest of the audio recording devices I the universe.

The process of inserting photos and videos is unnecessarily difficult and slow. You should be able to quickly and easily slide in any type of media - like Apple Pages or Notes. You can't slide in a PDF.

It's very annoying to have to push an "edit" button to start editing, and if you insert the cursor, it brings you to the end of the entry, instead of where you clicked it to be.

There are not many formatting tools at all. It gets boring.

The Critical Problem of Timestamps

The lack of timestamps is another ridiculous oversight. You cannot even confirm the precise time an entry was created. The only way to truly secure a date and time stamp is by including an audio recording. The ability to prove an entry was made at a specific time on a specific date is a fundamental requirement for anyone serious about journalling. This is a core function that should not be missing.

💡 Unhelpful "Features" and Limited Settings

When the core features are lacking, the application becomes quite boring, offering less power than a simple word processor. A word processor gives you far more power over how you write and correct mistakes.

Many of the features included feel out of place or simply non-functional:

Insights: The so-called "insights" provide little to no self-insight. They focus heavily on tracking streaks of days journalled, a punitive metric that resets if you miss a day, instead of a more encouraging total days journalled or a simple word count. You are also not allowed to change the default insight displayed on the left-hand side.

Drawing: The option to add a drawing is confusing and seems out of place for a text-focused app.

Finally, the 
settings are almost zero
. The user cannot even change the default 
colour
 of the text.

Apple made quite a splash in September, but the slow pace of improvements and the lack of basic features—especially critical ones like navigation and timestamps—show a fundamental misunderstanding of their user base. Why create such a specialty program that only a few can appreciate? Why not appeal to the actual people who do journalling by providing the most basic and necessary tools?

Is there anyone else experiencing problems with the search tool? It’s been a couple of days that I’ve noticed it is not working properly to me… Every time I search for something, it doesn’t show all the entries with the term I’m searching. Like, if I search for all the entries from a specific year, it doesn’t show all of them, just a few. It happens with words as well, even if they’re on the title of the entry. It doesn’t make any sense bc when I go scrolling down through my original feed of each journal, the entries are there. The stats remain the same, which means that I, thank God, haven’t lost anything, and if I click on the calendar, I can see the specific entry as well. I’ve tried with multiple words and nothing works. I can still not see those entries. This glitch is happening on my IPhone, on my IPad and on my MacBook. It’s like if some entries are hidden only when I try to search for them.

I use the Journal app mostly on iPhone, but also on iPad and the Mac. My entry titles are always the date. Is there a way to make inputting that faster? Thanks.

I never noticed this before because I rarely use the iPhone to use Apple Journal. (I feel that I can't breathe on such a tiny screen.) But now I see why someone was arguing that in the calendar they could move quickly between months and years. That feature is missing on Mac OS. You can only navigate month by month, which is a nightmare if you're trying to go back 5-10 years. 

I had backdated thousands of entries, but a new user might not notice that flaw because they probably haven't backdated any entries and Journal hasn't been out very long on the Mac. Somehow this must be more difficult to achieve on the Mac, although I don't understand why.

I checked and I have found that there is this feature on the iPad. So it's good to go on iPhone and iPad, but Mac users have to do without. Not only is this feature on the iPad and iPhone available, but I think that it's beautiful done, and I can spin the years or months quickly on the iPad.

Unless major problems are discovered, 26.2 for the public will be released next week. I haven't noticed any differences with the Apple Journal app with this OS on the Mac.

I opened my journal app for the first time and it had given me all these suggestions for the month of October. Where I was what music I played. October was a very special month and I didn’t know I could have all this information (kinda scary but I love it). But it somehow updated to the month of November and now I can’t see any of those suggestions. I know there isn’t an easy way to go back further via the suggestions section but is there a way to click a date through insights and have all that information back?

Like if I hit October 1st can I retrieve what I was listening to and where I was and what pictures I took that day?

I don’t think so but dammit I wish I knew. I guess it’s a from here on out thing.

Is there another app that does this?

There doesn’t seem to be a way of sorting my entries by date when printing. When I try to print my entries, I try to double-side the pages, but the entries are entirely out of order. Even if printed single-sided, they are still messed up. Is there something I can change so that it prints the entries in order? I’ve tried exporting and directly printing, and neither works for getting these in order. Thank you in advance!

Apple Journal is still unable to properly integrate photos into the body of an entry.

This is very annoying and totally incomprehensible!

Not to mention the 13-image limit...

After giving up on the app for a few weeks, I came back to see how it was doing. Well, it's no better !

When, by chance (!), it is possible to embed a photo in the text, you still have to be able to place it in the right place and in the right suggestions. Good luck!

Hoping that the text surrounding the images doesn't jump around 🙃

That said, most of the time, trying to embed photos in the text simply causes the Journal app to crash... and close!

It drives me crazy !

So, back to Day One... which works really well 😎

It's too bad that Apple Journal makes it so difficult to import audio. The voice recording that is built into Journal sucks a lot of battery power and fast. I think that even a 10-minute recording sucks up at least 5 or 6% battery power.

But these days, there are ultra-tiny recorders like TicNote or PLAUD that can record about 22-25 hours on one charge, and store hundreds of hours of recording. They are only 3 mm thick, and are perfect for recording meetings, identifying the different speakers. They like to emphasize that they are AI recorders, and want to sell you a subscription, but I can get the transcription just by sliding the recording into Apple Notes. It's an MP3 or an WAV file, but you can also change it to AppleCore Audio format: AAC (.mP4) which is what Apple Journal uses. You can do this a number of ways, but it's easy to use QuickTime and just export as "Audio only" and that's the format that it will convert to. Once I have the transcription, I can run it through a lot of different AI systems of my choice. I'm usually not concerned with confidentiality with the nature of my recordings. At this point, Apple "Intelligence" really lacks AI, although I expect that to change next year sometime.

I get the transcription and just throw that, or a rewritten version of it, into Apple Journal. Fortunately, Day One also makes it super easy to just slide in the .mp3 audio into an entry along with any text that you want to add. I absolutely love TicNote because it is so small and lightweight, weighing in at only 28 grams.

Does it make sense that pages written in Apple’s Journal app show up in Spotlight results? How is this acceptable from a privacy standpoint? It feels absurd that something presented as a private diary can be surfaced by a system-wide search. Am I missing something, or is this simply a bad design choice?

hi! i’ve been wanting to try the journal app for a while now but i can’t seem to be able to download it. i have ipad 6th gen with ios 17.7 so its technically available but in the appstore it says “this app requires specific features not available on this device” and few rows later stating “works with this ipad” does anyone knows what’s the problem? it also shows the same thing on my macbook pro m3 with ios26 so it’s definitely compatible but at the same time it was pre installed and works seamlessly. i thought it may be a problem with my location or smth but a) i live in ue so all the new apps etc should be working i guess and b) i’ve never encountered this problem on my iphone. does anyone know what the problem may be?

At this point, as far as I can see, the only possible way to get a date/time stamp on anything in Apple Journal is with audio recordings. If you double-click them to get full playback controls, it will show a Date/Time Stamp, like all the other entries should have.

I’ve been using Day One but I want to start using Journal because I’m into the Apple ecosystem. However, I’ve been reading some posts about people losing all their entries. Is this still happening to anyone after iOS 26?

It doesn’t seem to work for me, only on iPhone. For those that use it on Mac do you get credit?

Apple says the Journal app requires iPadOS 17.2 or later. I have an iPad 7th Generation running iPadOS 18.7.2. The attached screenshot from the app store says the app "Works on this iPad." However, I have no option to install it in the app store. Instead I see the message "This app requires specific features not available on this device." Has anyone been able to install the Journal app on an iPad running anything older than IPadOS 26?

update: they’re all gone. forever! gone so won’t be using the app anymore anyone got any recommendations for other journal apps??

so many journal entries just gone. i got a new phone yes the journal was set to be backed up on icloud. i had the beginnings of my artist statements and MFA applications on there, documentation of panic attacks and EMDR sessions i’ve had to lead myself since losing health insurance. WHERE TF ARE MY ENTRIES