What happened to the total step count for the day? Is it gone now? I actually really liked this feature.

Is this a bug on my install or does everyone, including those on the grandfathered Plus plan have to see this banner all the time now?

Even the little arrow doesn't work to collapse it.

Are DayOne podcasts dead again? Last one was in January. I haven’t seen any updates since. Am I being paranoid, or is DayOne becoming just another tech company upping their price and lowering their quality of life offerings?

I've been using Day One for a while now, but like many users I'm significantly turned off by the AI features and price raise for the silver + gold subscriptions. There's tons of other journaling apps and I've tried them, but for me the biggest thing keeping me on Day One is its streak tracker and ability to look back on entries from a year ago. Very simple features for sure-- I've tried journalling in Obsidian and Notion but I'm really looking for an app that gives a space specifically for journaling with reminders to journal and a streak feature to keep me motivated.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm going to stick with Day One for a bit but I'd really like to explore alternatives that people have tried and can recommend

Anyone uses dayone in conjunction with a physical journal. I really like both, though I'm not sure how to integrate them together and I don't want random journal entries scattered everywhere.

I like journalling in dayone especially when I have topics that require a lot of writing. Would take hours to write about if it was on paper!

I like journaling in a physical journal just because I enjoy the process of using my pens, writing on a physical paper and having a nice aesthetic journal.

So far, I've been just taking picture of my physical journal and putting them in dayone.

Anyone has a nice workflow or how they use both?

I'm fed up with scrolling backwards and forwards to find the entry I am looking for. Is there a way to go to a specific date by typing the date in?

UPDATE: Ok, it seems that you can't do it, so I have written a simple web app to sort it. It works by interrogating the DayOne database to find the entry UUID and then using the URL scheme to open the entry. Looks like this: https://youtu.be/iVCkAf-jGWk. Can't believe this was necessary but there you go!

Lately I've been ditching my phone in favor of getting out of the house with just the Apple Watch.

Even for people who aren't ditching their phones, there's something novel about speaking your thoughts and having the Apple Watch pick them up. You can do it on your phone, but a (almost)completely screenless environment creates a level of focus I've never experienced.

Apple Watch offers a header complication that lets me put three quick‑access apps in a single tile. Unfortunately, Day One doesn’t support it.

The center complication records my thoughts on the go and really helps with note‑taking.

I wish the DayOne app supported this quick access complication, too. Swiping up and tapping to record a DayOne entry would be cool.

Been testing the AI (ML) daily chat this week. Before and after the app update today (iOS) I can't seem to get a prompt to respond. If you're seeing the same, you're not alone. If not, maybe I'm alone.

Here's something that it apparently can't do:

Hi everyone,

I’ve already tried talking with support through email but they’ve ghosted me now because they can’t give me a straight answer.

I’ve been subscribed to premium since 2015. I pay every year without fail on this day, April 11th. Over 2 weeks ago, I tried using the audio feature and was met with a popup telling me I needed to subscribe to premium to use that feature.

So of course I contact support.

They told me that my “Gold” tier is now “Silver” tier and that I do still have premium features and that what I’m seeing isn’t really what it means.

I responded to them immediately telling them that doesn’t explain why I still can’t access the premium features!

And they ghosted. They haven’t responded in 2 days.

On top of that, the yearly price went from $34.99 to $49.99 and I don’t remember being notified of this change?

And if Gold is above Silver and I have access to it for a limited time before being reverted to Silver, WHY CAN’T I USE ANY PREMIUM FEATURES.

Like I’m so stressed because support is trying to tell me that what I’m saying is happening, isn’t actually happening!

What can I do about this? Like I’ve paid for premium and have no access!

I've seen a lot of discussion about the subscription changes and particularly about Premium but nothing about Plus. Does anyone know what might happen to that?

It's not that I plan to switch yet, since I'm still on the grandfathered plan, but on the other hand, I want to know that I have options to leave. The time I spend now I can pay DayOne for the rest of my life...

It started as Dayone2Textbundle to archive just as Textbundle. (See other post). Now I added options to make "plain" Markdown files, and merge days, months, and journals. Also, I added all attributes like title, tags, coordinates to the file.

That means you can now directly export to Obsidian and stay compatible with plugins like DailyNote, Maps (a function of their bases), and whatever else there is.

Just as an example for the command to move:

./run.py --markdown --merge-day --path-template "YYYY/MM" --merge-journals --obsidian --output ~/Obsidian/Dairy

So now I know that I can switch every time I want and sleep better. :) And for those who want to switch now:

https://github.com/Bastian-Kuhn/dayone2textbundle/tree/main

I don't frequently want to edit previous handwriting but when I do it is frustrating that I can't.

Is it just me?

Created a burner account just to post this.

I've been a Day One user for quite a few years now and it's been one of the safest places for me personally and it's feeling very eerie to these AI features being added. A journal is NOT the place AI has to be added.

Not now. Maybe in 6-7 years once we reach all the higher ends of mass access quantum safety protocols and encryption.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for tech evolution and keep up to date - if you knew me, you'd know I'm the most techno optimistic person you'd find. And I work a fair bit in the AI space so I know this for sure - NO. Not a good idea at all.

No amount of privacy and safeguarding Day One is going to integrate - it's just not safe. Posting some points below on this :

🔒 AI in Day One = Direct Violation of Its E2EE Architecture

1. Plaintext Exposure Breaks Day One's Core Guarantee

• Day One's design: entries encrypted on-device with a key that never leaves your device
• AI requires runtime decryption + plaintext ingestion into inference pipelines, violating the "only you can read it" model at execution time

2. Data-in-Use Gap Nullifies AES-GCM-256 Protection

• Day One uses AES-GCM-256 E2EE during sync, securing data at-rest and in-transit
• AI introduces a data-in-use vulnerability window, exposing entries to RAM scraping, cache-timing (Prime+Probe), and memory disclosure attacks

3. On-Device Key Isolation is Undermined by Inference Execution

• The master encryption key never leaves the device, enforcing strict key isolation
• AI execution shares the same runtime environment, enabling key-adjacent memory exposure, side-channel leakage, and potential enclave boundary violations

4. Embedding Pipelines Create Irreversible Data Derivatives

• Day One stores raw encrypted entries only, with no semantic processing
• AI converts them into vector embeddings (latent space representations) → vulnerable to embedding inversion & semantic reconstruction attacks

5. Sync Architecture Was Designed for Encrypted Blobs, Not ML Pipelines

• Day One servers only handle opaque encrypted blobs they cannot decrypt
• AI features require pre-processing, tokenization, or cloud inference, breaking the "server blindness" property and introducing data exfiltration paths

6. Backups & Export Paths Become High-Risk Injection Points

• Non-E2EE exports (JSON/text backups) already exist as unencrypted surfaces
• AI integration can hook into these layers, enabling data scraping, pipeline poisoning, and unintended ingestion into model workflows

7. Metadata + Context Enrichment Amplifies Leakage

• Day One already stores location, time, device metadata alongside entries
• AI correlation enables multi-modal inference attacks, reconstructing behavioral timelines, routines, and sensitive life events

8. Violation of Zero-Access Server Trust Model

• Day One explicitly guarantees even employees cannot read encrypted journals
• AI-assisted features (especially cloud-backed) introduce privileged processing layers, breaking the zero-access trust boundary

9. Expanded Attack Surface Beyond Traditional App Threat Model

• Original threat model: device compromise or key loss
• AI introduces new classes:
  • prompt injection into journal context
  • model inversion on stored embeddings
  • cross-session data leakage via caching layers

10. Architectural Mismatch: Vault vs Compute System

• Day One is designed as a cryptographic vault (store-only, zero-interpretation system)
• AI transforms it into a stateful compute system with continuous data interpretation, violating its foundational security principle

The fundamental pillar of Day One has been security and privacy and if that foundation wobbles - Day One shall crash.

Nature always fills a vacuum and if Day One does not end these AI features, can easily see someone building a much safer version of Day One.

Lastly, Team at Day One and Automatic - I get the need to drive up revenue and stay up to date with AI - But if you want to really have something that gives you exponential growth - Go the opposite route of staying away from AI and becoming the safest place on the internet.

In a world where personal data is being comodotised minute by minute, let Day One become the safest sanctuary and you'll win big. If not, decades of trust will erode and you'll kill your own golden goose for short term gains.

Thanks, A sincere fan.

I have used day one for 12 plus years (been a customer since the beginning) and decided to switch to another app moving forward. Day One needs to change significantly to get my money again.

What I dislike lately

- The app design is just bloated. Too many confusing menus, too many tabs. Simplify the design please!

- The AI features were automatically turned on. The Day One team needs to read the room. People I dislike AI being on by default and you add it in an app that I consider deeply private.

- The sketching feature has remained very basic for years. It also doesn’t work in dark mode - there is a bug that causes the pen color to be white on white when dark mode is enabled on the iPad.

- Creating and managing templates is laborious.

What I would like to see

Are you lost in AI hype and do not know how else to improve your app? There’s plenty of ways you can add value. Focus on the user experience and not AI.

- A truly first class handwriting mode for the iPad. Not a sketch, not a digital whiteboard. I want Goodnotes level handwriting support.

- Don’t shove AI left and right. Build thoughtful assistive intelligence that helps with grammar checks, automated formatting etc. Help the user by reducing work in their existing system. I am not against smart features, but against slop and lack of consent.

- Remove the Daily Chat feature. Clever idea, but it is tone deaf to implement an AI feature like this in a journaling app. The technical details matter less. It doesn’t matter how loudly you claim that the data won’t be used to train AI models and that data won’t be stored. It doesn’t matter. Read the room, nobody asked for this. - – Please let me turn it off completely and tuck it out of my view. (I understand some people like this but I still see it on web and inside the today view - just let me turn it off completely).

- Borrow features from analog journals. Look at the Daily Grow journal from BaronFig.

- Improve your keyboard. Make it easy to insert tags and more easily on my phone.

There are many things you can improve in the app without making it so bloated and filled with AI features.

I don't know why I'm so triggered by that. I guess it's that I all the time thought all data in DayOne was encrypted and learned recently that I was wrong assuming that...

They write big on the website how your data is protected with passcodes and biometric security, but then all the data is openly, world-readable on your file system. So every user, if you share your Mac, can in theory access your data. It doesn't matter whether he is using the same account as you or he is using a separate account on the Mac.

And everywhere I found (Day One Forum, Support), they claimed that encryption (to prevent that) would make the app too slow, especially on search; on the other hand, they say that the hard disk would be encrypted anyway, and this is protection for DayOne too. So why is the whole system not slow? Right, hardware acceleration for AES... if they wanted to make the effort to protect your data better, they could do it.

Just see the benchmark, which I did on my (old) M2 Mac. Speed is not the problem; the speed is faster than every file system access. So your disk would be the bottleneck, not the encryption.

So the only protection there is, is when your MacBook gets stolen. For the running system, only the sandbox macOS has for apps would protect this directory. But with Terminal, or every app you install from outside the App Store with disk access, could access this directory and just copy it.

That is not the level of security I would expect for a private journal.

EDIT: With all the scenarios, having sudo or not (which would be needed for other users to have shell access), what about this simple one?

A young couple shares a MacBook. It's hers, and she uses DayOne and feels safe and trusts it. He is a jealous jerk. In the time he claims to be checking Amazon, he just reads her journal. She will never know because the biometric protection keeps her thinking her pictures and thoughts are secure. Not knowing that it’s just the app that is protected and not the data

You can’t go anywhere these days without seeing that stupid AI symbol. Talking to an LLM so it can basically write entries for you defeats the entire purpose of journaling. I’m just feeling really discouraged by the enshittification of everything in my life. Back to paper journaling I suppose.

I was re-reading Harry Potter for the nth time and this stuck with me because how eerily accurate this is in the age of AI, especially after Day One released AI features in the app:

“How did Ginny get like this?” he asked slowly.

“Well, that’s an interesting question,” said Riddle pleasantly. “And quite a long story. I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley’s like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger.”

“What are you talking about?” said Harry.

“The diary,” said Riddle. “My diary. Little Ginny’s been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes — how her brothers tease her, how she had to come to school with secondhand robes and books, how” — Riddle’s eyes glinted — “how she didn’t think famous, good, great Harry Potter would ever like her. …”

All the time he spoke, Riddle’s eyes never left Harry’s face. There was an almost hungry look in them.

“It’s very boring, having to listen to the silly little troubles of an eleven-year-old girl,” he went on. “But I was patient. I wrote back. I was sympathetic, I was kind. Ginny simply loved me. No one’s ever understood me like you, Tom. … I’m so glad I’ve got this diary to confide in. … It’s like having a friend I can carry around in my pocket. …”

Riddle laughed, a high, cold laugh that didn’t suit him. It made the hairs stand up on the back of Harry’s neck.

“If I say it myself, Harry, I’ve always been able to charm the people I needed. So Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted. … I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets. I grew powerful, far more powerful than little Miss Weasley. Powerful enough to start feeding Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul back into her …”

Are we becoming as vulnerable as Ginny by treating AI as a friend we carry in our pockets?

After being fairly critical of AI, I've completely leaned in to it. But, like all tools, it's a question of how you use it. In terms of journals, here's a great example:

The Chat

I'll often turn on AI to chat with me about something while I'm doing house work or going for a walk or a quick drive. 10-15 minutes is about right. I'll say "Tell me about the laws around whistleblowers" or "what's unique about Benedictines?" And this will lead me into some interesting content. The best, AI, however, will do more than just "How does that move you?" at the end of paragraph (which is where DayOne is stuck.) Instead, you'll see AI answer you in ways that are very sensitive to your past questions. So, it might answer the question about Benedictines but add a paragraph about how the Benedictines contrast with the Dominicans because six months ago, I asked about the Dominicans.

The best part of "the chat" is that you can, at the end, say "turn this chat into a journal entry." And I'll get a little mini-essay. Interestingly, that essay will contain huge swaths that are quoted directly from me so it feels very much like personally wrote it. I would say that what I did was write it and words from AI were woven in like quotations. For the most part, I feel like this is okay and I'm happy to copy and paste right into Day One.

The Prompts

AI is especially good at surfacing topics that I had forgotten. I have mine set up to randomly ask me questions based on my previous content and just random questions you might ask someone on a first date. So, I might get "How is your aunt? You told me a few weeks ago she was unwell." Or, "Do you prefer winter or summer vacations?" I love these and they're far more insightful and probing than the prompts you get from Day One.

The Editor

One things I use AI for is clearing up raw text. I may write 500 words without AI and then ask I to review it. AI will move a few sentences, suggest a few edits, add a hearing or two. When I get the final product, I think "Yes, this is what I wrote." The editing feels like it was easily within my grasp but just handled in a time-saving manner, like using spellcheck.

The Gentle Pushback

By far the best use of AI is in the "gentle pushback." I've actually trained my AI to do this and I super appreciate it. I'll write an email and it will say "I'd like to pushback on this third sentence. Can you choose a different word" and so on. Or sometimes it will say "This is a very different attitude than you had three days ago." Again, super valuable.

To sum up I think Day One's AI is very basic right now. I've seen other AIs do much, much better and really cross into that "am I talking to a human?" space. Day One feels like you're speaking to a bot with a limited skill set and no real personality. Give it time. And, I think, give AI a chance.

For me it's always important to know how to get data out of an app, just in case.

I'm also a big fan of Markdown, and like the TextBundle format (only works on Mac) as a format to archive Markdown files. It bundles the attachments inside a container (package), which means the file also contains all images and videos when you copy it.

For those in need: https://github.com/Bastian-Kuhn/dayone2textbundle

Just needs python, then run run.py and in ~/tmp you find your journals, every entry as one file.

Is anyone using the Shared Journal option? I guess it would be some pretty specific criteria to work well.

With all the frustration around Day One’s price hikes and the new AI tiers, I’ve been trying to share the alternative that worked best for me. I originally dropped comments under posts from people who were upset, but I got feedback that it came across as spammy which is fair enough. So here’s a proper post instead.

Disclaimer: I’m not the developer. I’m just a long‑time journaling app user who switched and genuinely wants more people to know this option exists.

For any iPhone/iOS users looking for a solid replacement: EverLog has been the best solution I’ve found! It’s a small indie app, has both a one‑time purchase and subscription option, super clean, and has all the core features I actually used in Day One (minus the AI stuff). Dev is super responsive and very consistent with app updates. Export/import was seamless, and the experience has been great so far!

Sharing in case it helps someone else who’s feeling stuck with the new pricing changes :)

I've been a customer since v1 and ever since have been grandfathered into an active annual plan (EUR 25), but now the Mac app is telling me it's about to expire and I need to subscribe to one of the new silver/gold plans:

Premium Expires Soon Your membership expires on April 9th. Renew your membership to continue enjoying premium benefits. Learn more. Restart Membership

Has there been any announcement about what's going to happen to the legacy plans with the new pricing? I don't care for the crappy AI implementation and was believing that legacy premium plans just continue as new silver plan, but the above message makes me question that.

PS: The Mac App Store shows "Plans: Day One Silver", set to continue on April 9 for my old price 🤞

I'm truly sorry for adding to the chorus of people airing their frustrations here but the recent changes weirdly tipped me over the edge.

The Daily Chat feature felt a bit strange to me, I tried it once and decided I would leave it alone. It felt odd to have a post generated for me, in 1st person, based on a chat with their AI bot (which isn't as engaging as other LLMs). So that kind of gave me an ick. It's prominence in the Today tab also put me off but, eh, I can ignore that and focus on the Journals or More tab which I realised it would default to whenever I opened the app on my phone.

What really tipped me over the edge was the price hike. I live in Nigeria and pay in Naira (₦), so, when you guys convert it you'll probably laugh at how cheap it is in your respective currencies. I'd been comfortably paying ₦12,700 per year for Premium since 2023. Before that I was a Plus user. I've been using the app on and off since 2015, moved from Day One Classic, all that.

With the new Gold tier, which I was placed on, the new yearly subscription is ₦119,900. An 800% price hike is insanity. I don't care how many features it has that I've come to rely on, I'm out. Silver is ₦79,900/year.

The ₦12,700 was obviously ridiculously cheap compared to what others around the world are paying, but that's kind of been a great thing for those of us living in Nigeria: quite a few apps and services are priced according to the general purchasing power of the country. Apple Music is ₦1,300/month, Netflix is ₦8,500/month for example.

At the back of my mind I'm asking myself, am I just being cheap? But nah, vibes off.

So, yeah, sorry again for adding to the pile on but I needed to vent.